


i'm the ribs in your chest

by dbaa



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: (but bad), Alternate Universe - 1990s, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Religion, Slow Burn, Summer Camp, conversion therapy, im SORRY mary frank and edward sledge you have been severely shafted, liberal mischaracterisation of extended family for the sake of drama, sid/sledge mention but it's not really a thing which is why it's not up there
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-24
Packaged: 2020-02-27 04:43:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 24,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18731830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dbaa/pseuds/dbaa
Summary: That night, with Merriell one bed over, Eugene has a dream about running around in the thickets and trees that hug the camp, dragging his feet when they refuse to cooperate, blades of crabgrass biting at his soles. One of the sporadic bedroom checks wakes him up, the flashlight's beam stretching from the door to his face and pressing at his eyelids. It lingers on Merriell far longer. Something makes Eugene not want to look at him: his slight figure under the covers, lamplit eyes peering out and seeking out even the slightest flicker of light to reflect.1996. Eugene and Merriell share a bedroom at God's Hope, a conversion camp. Written for Sledgefu Week 2019, for the movie and TV AU, loosely based onThe Miseducation of Cameron Post.





	1. one

Merriell arrives a week later than everyone else, and although in the grand scheme of things two days is peanuts to a whole summer, it makes a difference. It's like there's the rest of them, and then there's him, the Seven-Days-Later one. It's funny that he ends up being the Seven-Days-Later one and not the one who tried to run off before he'd even made it inside, but then God made the world in seven days so there might have been some irony behind it. They're all watching his arrival, in any case, so it isn't that nobody saw him try to run. They're sitting in a circle in the field, all twelve of them, waiting for someone to talk about their feelings and desperate for something else to look at, and then there's the sound of tires on gravel and they all turn as one to look. It's strange that John doesn't try to call their attention back, but maybe he's too busy watching too. There's something funny about that, the way people will unanimously turn towards the sound of an opening door.

It's a beat-up old station wagon, shades of brown, dusty and dirty around the tire rims. It stops and nothing happens, and then the front passenger door opens and a figure gets out. He's tall, his hair shoulder-length and black and visibly greasy even from a distance. He swings around to the back door and wrenches it open and drags out a small, taut boy, kicking and struggling. They push and pull at each other with unpleasant viciousness until the boy is thrown back far enough to skitter across the gravel. He picks himself up and for a moment the two of them just freeze there, three feet away from each other before they seem to realise at the exact same moment that nothing is stopping the smaller one from making a run for it. Someone says, "Oh my God," and John says, "Hey, now."

He's tracked down easily enough on account of the fence, an ugly metallic thing that cuts through the woodland with a kind of callous indifference. Eugene has only seen it once, the day they'd headed out to make relief pictures, pressing paper up onto the barks of trees and rubbing with crayons until the texture came through. John picks himself up off the ground and lopes off after him, tailed by the man who usually accompanies their hymns with the piano. After they catch him, everyone tries to act like none of it happened, even though he's dragged back towards the buildings by his arms, right in front of them. Sometime in the fracas while they're all watching the silence between the trees, a woman gets out of the car too, crossing the lawn. Eugene remembers her quite clearly. She wears a ring on almost every finger, her dark maroon nails chipped in places, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. She seems austere, almost severe, dark-haired and unamused. When they park the boy in front of her she claps him on the back of the head and he stutters forwards, head down and looking at the ground.

Eugene is in his room when John knocks on the open door with him in tow, the boy. From a distance Eugene hadn't been able to see much except that he was small, wiry, dark-haired, but closer now – he's reading a book, and he puts it down in his lap, dog-earing the corner – it's easier to register the wide eyes, the small, pinched mouth, the square jaw. Eugene is staring at him and getting stared at in return, an almost hostile glare. John says, "Eugene, this is Merriell. He's going to be staying with you from now on."

That night, with Merriell one bed over, Eugene has a dream about running around in the thickets and trees that hug the camp, dragging his feet when they refuse to cooperate, blades of crabgrass biting at his soles. One of the sporadic bedroom checks wakes him up, the flashlight's beam stretching from the door to his face and pressing at his eyelids. It lingers on Merriell far longer. Something makes Eugene not want to look at him: his slight figure under the covers, lamplit eyes peering out and seeking out even the slightest flicker of light to reflect.

 

*

 

The latest they're allowed to arrive for breakfast is eight o'clock. In the toss-up between hot food for breakfast and a longer sleep, Eugene prefers the latter, so his alarm clock rings out at seven thirty. He hears Merriell groan over on the other bed, a protracted rustling. Eugene turns over, rubbing at his eyes and trying to focus. Merriell has thrown his pillow over his head and if it weren't for his arms poking out from under his blanket to hold the pillow against his ears, he'd have been entirely hidden. Eugene finds himself saying, "We ought to get up."

Merriell groans again. His voice comes out muffled. " _Ought to_."

"Yeah." Eugene sits up and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. The floor is carpeted but cold, scratchy rather than soft. He rubs his foot against it to chase off an itch. "For breakfast."

"I ain't hungry."

Eugene watches the shifting lump under the covers, lips pressed into a thin line. "You should come get breakfast. We eat lunch pretty late."

No response for a long moment, and then Merriell pokes his head out from under his pillow. His hair is sticking out at odd angles and squashed flat on one side. He looks tired, his eyes still a little misty, but the stare he targets Eugene with is unpleasant in its candour. "I. Ain't. Hungry."

Eugene presses the heels of his hands against his mattress and a spring creaks. "You need to come. For roll call."

Merriell's lip curls. "Fascists." As if that's any kind of end to a conversation, he scoops himself back under the blanket, and then, muffled, adds, "I ain't hungry."

Eugene waits a second in case he wants to append another postscript before he says, "Alright." He pulls his legs back up onto his bed, sitting criss-cross applesauce and pressing his folded index finger against his bottom lip. Everyone else has a roommate and for the last week Eugene had been worrying about the empty bed in his room, but now, seeing it occupied, a different wave of discomfort washes over him. Do they think that Merriell needs extra help because he tried to run off? Do they think that Eugene's the one to be giving it to him? The weight of responsibility settles on his shoulders. It's in his mouth too, slightly sour, an old penny, coppery on the flat of his tongue. He swallows.

"If you don't come it'll be worse for you," he says, evenly. "They only want to make sure you didn't run away again. But if you don't come they'll have to come in here and check."

"Boo fuckin' hoo. Sad for them." With a sense of finality, Merriell shoves his pillow aside. He's still glaring, catching onto the expression more solidly the longer he's awake. "Can't even close the door. It's fucked up."

Eugene is trying to keep his voice even but it feels strange; he shouldn't have to be the one to defend them. "It's only to make sure we're not doing anything dangerous."

"Dangerous." Merriell's fingers curl around the blanket, a green patchwork that lightly contrasts Eugene's blue. "What, like jackin' off?"

Eugene presses his lips together and turns his head away even as he's feeling a hot flush run over his cheeks and down his neck. It's too late to hide it from Merriell, who he hears rather than sees pushing up onto his elbows and then sitting up. Eugene clears his throat. "You shouldn't be doing that, anyway. It's not right."

"Oh, fuck," Merriell says, and then he laughs, an unpleasant grating sound that makes Eugene shuffle where he's sitting and focus his gaze more intensely on the doorknob. " _Fuck_. They roomed me with a goddamn bible thumper."

Eugene's brow furrows and he turns back, indignant. "I'm not a bible thumper." Merriell's not listening. He drops onto his back and his arm dribbles over the side of the bed. Eugene clears his throat and tries again. "Everyone here believes in God. It'd be hard to get roomed with someone who doesn't."

"You can't sit there and tell me you ain't _never_ jacked off. How old are you? Gotta be my age. Not _once_? Come _on_. Lyin' to yourself _and_ the Baby Jesus now."

"All I said was that it's not right." Embarrassment has made way for anger. Eugene stands up and snatches up a towel, holding it tightly against himself. "You're going to regret not coming for breakfast."

"Is that a threat?" Merriell turns his head lazily and regards Eugene with low-level antagonism, and Eugene shakes his head, a little mollified. "Go get your cereal or whatever."

Eugene goes.

 

*

 

After breakfast they have prayer time and hymns, which is for all intents and purposes a church service, only they never call it that. The girl beside him shuts her eyes when she sings. There's passion in it even as her voice wobbles and twists slightly unpleasantly around the tune. Eugene prefers to mouth the words the way you would if you didn't know the tune, even though he does. Yesterday they'd been planning the mass together, and John let them pick hymns. Now they're singing _Amazing Grace_ and _This Little Light of Mine_ and _The Old Rugged Cross_ , a hymn Eugene never liked because it made him think of the nails in Jesus' hands, the lacerations in his sides, and Thomas putting his fingers in them. An obscenity, a horror show. If he'd needed to touch the inside of an open wound to believe something, Eugene thinks he would rather have just believed it.

The girl with her eyes shut is Laura May. She doesn't like just Laura or just May, but he's noticed that she tends to speed through her name like she's desperate for it to be over, _Lauramay,_ like _Laramie_ , like the TV show from the sixties. Laura May always sits close to him, like she's decided he's the one. She's blonde and braids her hair in one long plait down the middle of her back, and during the day pieces fall out and curl around her face. She's pretty.

He's lost his place in the song. He looks up from his Xeroxed leaflet, still closed in his lap, and registers that he's being looked at. Not by Laura May, who has her eyes shut. John doesn't like it when they're distracted in mass, so Eugene turns his head just a little to the left, trying to make use of his peripheral vision. Merriell is two rows behind him. He's folded his leaflet into a triangle but he's not looking at it, or singing; his lips are a thin, small line. Eugene doesn't know when he got here, just that he definitely didn't come alone. He hadn't been here when they'd all taken their seats, but now Dr Harlow is sitting next to him, very close, with her hair pulled into a severe bun that makes the skin on her face look like it's been stretched too thin.

On his first day here, like with everyone else, Eugene had been invited into Dr Harlow's office and given a piece of paper with an iceberg floating in a cold sea drawn on it. The part of the iceberg above the water was labelled _Eugene's same-sex attraction_. Dr Harlow had explained to him that all the people in his life could see was the top of the iceberg, but that there were a thousand other sins under the surface that nobody could see, that were so much bigger than his same-sex attraction, and that to fix it, all he had to do was understand what had made the iceberg as big as it was. She asked him if he liked sports and he'd told her that he was interested enough in watching them but he'd never grown up playing them, since on account of his heart murmur and sickness as a child he'd been excluded from a lot of physical activities. To demonstrate, she'd written, in a spidery flowing cursive under the line that signified the water, that Eugene's distance from sports and mollycoddling as a child due to sickness had caused gender confusion. Did he have any brothers or sisters? Yes, an older brother, Edward. Another note under the water: jealousy of an overachieving older brother. He didn't want to kiss other boys, he just wanted to be like them.

Dr Harlow had handed him the paper with instructions for him to fill the underside of the glacier with as many contributing factors as possible. "And Eugene," she'd said, lightly, neatening a stack of papers by hitting them firmly against the surface of her desk, "you have to remember that the first step to recovery is to stop thinking of yourself as a homosexual."

He'd felt his fingers curling around each other nervously in his lap and, with careful intention, he'd prised them apart. "I don't think of myself as a homosexual."

Dr Harlow had looked up from her desk with a furrow in her brow. "Then what do you think of yourself as?"

It was the look on her face that had made him regret saying anything. The silence bore down, questioning him too, the second she'd stopped. "Not that." It was the truth. Homosexual is a dirty word, an ugly word. It means nasty things, unpleasant things, rutting in the dark, sweaty and grasping and gasping and a little dead, a little death. Eugene wrinkled his nose in the face of her stare, unblinking, unyielding, so cold. "I don't know."

"Well." She stacked up her papers again, businesslike. "That's alright, Eugene. That's good. Dissociate yourself from the word. That's how it should be." And then she'd smiled at him, warm and encouraging, and he'd felt his shoulders slouch in relief. "You're going to do so well here. You'll be home before you know it."

 

*

 

When he gets back to his room after lunch, Merriell is sat cross-legged on Eugene's bed with Eugene's things spread out around him and for a moment Eugene's heart stops and he panics, but the blue-bound notebook he keeps under his mattress isn't on display, so he at least can't have found that. Merriell looks up at him when he hears footsteps and Eugene is instantly frozen in the doorway; it's strange that he's the deer in headlights, when Merriell is the one snooping.

"What are you doing?" Eugene says breathlessly, his hand clutching for the doorframe, white-knuckled. "That's my stuff."

"Just lookin'."

The answer is so simple that it baffles him. He stumbles into the room, their room, and makes a beeline for his bed, into which Merriell is currently pressing a divot with his body. He's so skinny he doesn't seem capable of depressing the mattress and in the moment Eugene forgets that, when they'd all been watching him and the older boy with the long hair, Merriell had given just as good as he got. He reaches for his pencil case and Merriell snatches it away before he can touch it, holding it just out of reach like a schoolyard bully. Eugene stares at him uncomprehendingly and makes another swipe, feeling like his arms are moving through maple syrup. The pencils rattle against the fastenings and each other. Eugene lunges and pinches at the zipper, tearing it back, and the teeth slide apart from each other and his pencils spill out onto the bed, the floor, Merriell's lap.

"Look what you gone and done," Merriell says absently. He's been sitting half on Eugene's iceberg and it's crinkled, crumpled under the pressure of his bony leg. Eugene, halfway through gathering up his pencils, grabs at the iceberg and almost immediately slices his fingertip on the corner of the page. The sting doesn't register until he's holding it, pressing clotted red half-fingerprints onto the surface. A wave of anger rolls over him, looking at the mess he's made, the pencils all over, the blood under the water, and he lunges clumsily at Merriell, pushing him hard in the centre of his chest with both hands. Merriell skitters off the bed like he's made of nothing, a heap of Eugene's papers and artworks going with him, but to Eugene's incredible, overwhelming irritation, he sits up grinning, almost laughing. "Kitty got _claws_ ," he says, like he's surprised, like it's the very last thing he expected. Eugene sticks his finger in his mouth and sucks at it, the sting turning concrete and hot whenever his tongue presses against it.

Merriell picks up a sheaf of papers and flings them carelessly back onto Eugene's bed, a few of them bent halfway in the middle. They'll stay like that if they're left alone, creased into three-dimensionality. Eugene's short of breath and embarrassed by the swell of anger still sitting in his stomach like boiling rice, sucking up the water the longer it's left unattended. He takes his finger out of his mouth when he realises it's making him look like a child and turns his head away for a second to blink away the film of angry tears that have crowded in his eyes. "What's your problem?" he barks at Merriell, wanting to sound cool, but his voice cracks sharply in the last word and he flushes, feels himself going pink and then red.

"I don't have a problem." Merriell stands up, brushes himself down. "I was just lookin'."

"You should've asked," Eugene splutters, helplessly. "You can't just touch other people's things."

"You scared I'll rub somethin' off on you?" Merriell asks, and it makes Eugene pause for a second. He hadn't been scared before but now he is. Merriell touching his things, leaving behind the ephemera of sin, dirty marks like muddy smears, black and pungent. The Seven-Days-Later boy, the one who tried to run away, sitting on his bed and putting his hands all over his belongings, his writing, his art, maybe even his clothes, the most sacrilegious violation. He doesn't want to kiss other boys, he just wants to rip their heads off.

Eugene clears his throat to ward off another crack and says, "No. Don't be stupid. How would you feel if I started touching your things?" With the bed between them, they're both puffing up in confidence; Eugene can see in Merriell's eyes that he thinks he'd be able to knock him flat if he ran at him, but then Eugene's thinking the same thing. Maybe if they collided they'd both disappear.

"I don't got any things to touch."

Eugene rubs his nose. He's holding his salvaged pencils very tightly in his fist, a rainbow of colour. One of the leads has snapped and he can see it immediately, a fleck of dark red on his bedspread. He sits down on the edge of his bed and unhooks his fingers from around the pencils, letting them drop onto his mattress where they immediately slide against his thigh. "You should've asked," he says again.

Merriell watches him. The stare is familiar. After a moment's silence he says, "I wanted to read what you put on your iceberg."

Eugene looks up and meets his gaze. Firmer, this time: "You should've asked."

Almost immediately, Merriell looks away. He folds his arms across his chest and lifts his shoulders, the start of a shrug that never finishes. It makes him look smaller. "What's a heart murmur?"

"An unusual sound between heartbeats." Eugene sniffs and leans over for the case to press his pencils back inside it, feeling like a war medic haphazardly stuffing guts back inside a body before he superglues the skin together. Thinking about it makes him queasy. The zipper is stuck and won't close properly; he yanks at it but the teeth are bent out of place and he can't move them back. He only looks up when he feels the bed shift as Merriell sits down on it again, as far away from him as possible but still right there. "I've had one since I was a baby."

Merriell blinks. "And it made you gay?"

"—what?"

"You put it on your iceberg. Your heart murmur. You said it made you weak growin' up."

"I said it made me weak. I don't think it made me—" for a moment he has trouble fitting his mouth around the word and as his hesitation turns into a pause he flushes pink again, frustrated at himself enough to finally spit it out, "—gay."

Merriell, with his thumbnail pressed up against his bottom lip, fitting it between his teeth to chew on it, had to have noticed the pause, but if he did he doesn't say anything about it. "But that's what it's for, right? All the stuff under the water is the stuff that makes you gay."

Eugene turns where he's sitting, pulling his legs up onto the bed, tucking one under himself. The atmosphere between them is cautiously returning to a baseline, and every second that feeling grows stronger, Eugene feels his flush shrinking back into his body, his confidence prickling back up. If he thinks about it too much, the strange shift to an almost pleasant conversation, he'll become too aware of it, and it'll all start to feel precarious and strained, like an old rubber band ready to snap. "It's just the things that confuse you. There's no such thing as homosexuality. It's just gender confusion."

Merriell tips his head to one side and drops his hand into his lap. "I'm not gender confused. I don't think I'm a girl or nothin'."

Eugene pushes aside his pencil case with a sense of finality. "Do you have any sisters?"

"Yeah. Two."

"Are you close?"

"With one of 'em." Merriell's back to chewing his thumbnail, avoiding Eugene's eye. He's so used to the stare already that the avoidance is starting to feel strange. "Fanny. We're almost twins. People think we are but she's a year older. Not even that. Ten months."

"Maybe you have same-sex attraction because you want to be like her."

"I don't wanna be like her." Merriell looks up, brow furrowed. "I just like her. She's my sister."

"Well." Eugene fumbles for a moment. It's a sweet thing to say and he hadn't expected it to come out of Merriell's mouth. Maybe the sister isn't the problem. "Well, who was that boy who – the one who was here when you got dropped off?"

Merriell's gaze darkens. "My brother. He ain't got shit to do with nothin'."

"Is he always like that with you?"

"Like what?"

"Like – violent."

Abruptly, Merriell shifts somehow, like a cat raising its hackles. It's hard for Eugene to pinpoint the exact place and way he'd changed, the direction in which he'd moved; looking at him is like looking at one half of a Spot the Difference puzzle and knowing there are things that have changed, but not where to start looking. "Don't you got a brother?"

"Yeah. Just one."

"Ain't he like that with you?"

"No." Eugene shakes his head, recoiling a little. "He ain't exactly full to the brim with brotherly love but he'd never _hit_ me." Sometimes he thinks that he and Edward are just too far apart in age, that they never could have hoped to function as anything other than people who lived in the same house for a period of time, since Edward had been sick to death of the idea of a little brother long before Eugene had burst into the world, red-faced and screaming and relocated instantly to the NICU. Eugene had taken up so much of his parents' attention after that; he wonders sometimes if he'd stolen the spotlight, if Edward had felt lonely, isolated, jealous, because of him, and that's why he's turned out the way he has. As he's getting older Eugene is starting to recognise that Edward's sneering and petty disposition isn't the standard, and if he can help it he shouldn't settle for it, but all those years of knocking on Edward's bedroom door, asking if he'd like to play or for help with homework and having Edward roundly refuse him without a glance, have cut Eugene's teeth at a certain angle. Dr Harlow probably wasn't right to say that he was jealous of an overachieving brother, but jealousy sounds easier to fix than rejection. He can stop being jealous of his own free will, but he can't make Edward want to be a brother to him.

Merriell leans into his space and pushes through the drifting, stretching band of his concentration, snapping him back into the moment. Merriell shifts to rest his back against the headboard, folding his legs so his knees are pointing up at the ceiling; he's holding a pencil that he must have scooped out from Eugene's case, but since he's flattening out his own wrinkled iceberg page on his thighs, it's easier for Eugene to excuse him. Merriell has the pencil poised to write but Eugene can see that the page is still blank.

"You can probably write somethin' about sports," Eugene says after a contemplative pause. Merriell looks up over the edge of the page, so he clarifies, "If you play a lot of sports you can say somethin' about team bonding and changing rooms and stuff. If you're not that sporty then that could be a reason on its own because you weren't growin' into a masculine role. You know?"

As he's talking, Merriell's eyebrows are slowly lifting up. The silence after he's done talking stretches out until Merriell finally says, "Where you from?"

"Uh – Alabama."

Merriell's mouth cracks into a slow-spreading grin. "Yeah? That's what I thought."

 

*

 

Dr Harlow tells them all to shut their eyes and place the raisin they're holding into their mouths, but not to eat it, just to rest it lightly in the centre of their tongue. It's soft and small and Eugene panics for a moment that he'll swallow it by accident, it's too close to the back of his mouth. He imagines it touching his throat and almost coughs.

Dr Harlow tells them that it's quite alright to worry about swallowing the raisin, and that the only thing stopping them is sheer force of will. Because she told them not to swallow it. And the more you think about the raisin in your mouth – run your tongue against it, touch it if you want, see if you can move it around your mouth against your teeth and your gums and the insides of your cheeks – the more you think about it, the more aware you are of everything around it. Isn't that true? (It is.) But even as you're holding it there, on your tongue, you can convince yourself that it's always been there, can't you? (You can.)

Dr Harlow tells them that holding the raisin in your mouth might be easy for a minute or two or ten, or maybe even an hour if you're particularly patient. But eventually, life will get in the way, and it'll be hard to talk around the raisin, and you'll want to swallow, and eat food, and do other things, and go to sleep, which is a time when you're not really in control of your body at all. So eventually, you'll have to swallow it.

Dr Harlow tells them that their same-sex attraction is just like the raisin. It sits inside you and touches all of your insides, your guts and your heart and your lungs and your brain, and if you hold onto it for long enough you might start to forget it's there, or that someone told you to put it there in the first place, that it's an artificiality, a lying thing.

Dr Harlow tells them that they can swallow it, now, if they want. They can crush it against their molars and chew it until it's mush, resting in their belly, a tiny thing, until it's eaten up and digested by stomach acid.

Eugene thinks about the raisin as his same-sex attraction, and he tips his head forward and spits it out. He isn't the only one.

 

*

 

Eugene wakes up sometime in the early morning, though he keeps his eyes shut tight in an effort to press himself back to into sleep. It's quiet except for the sound of his clock ticking and Merriell over in the other bed, breathing gently. Eugene rolls onto his side. The last few days have passed by thinly, an odd blurry feeling taking hold. Merriell has stuck very firmly to his side of the room, and it's not that they talk, exactly, but yesterday morning he'd scraped himself out of bed at seven thirty and traipsed to breakfast with him. He ate like a bird, picking at his food with his fingers, pushing it around on his plate, but he'd finished it all. Eugene is starting to wonder if the problem had been that Merriell just hadn't known him that well, that the whole place had been so strange and everyone had seemed out to get him, and now he knows that Eugene is on his side.

Merriell spends his free time lying on his bed, over the covers, listening to music. They're allowed Walkmans so it's not really a problem that all he seems to do is listen to his, but the music crushing out of his headphones probably isn't strictly allowed. Eugene wants to ask what it is, but every time he walks past their room and sees him there, lying on his back with his eyes shut, he can't bring himself to interrupt.

Now, in the dark, in the early morning, Eugene opens his eyes. It takes him a second to register the shapes around him. Merriell is on his side too, facing him, one arm lolling off the edge of the bed but the rest of him squirrelled up into a ball, tight and small. His head is only taking up a corner of the pillow and he's breathing with his mouth open. Even while he's sleeping, there's a furrow in his brow, and as Eugene watches him it deepens a little. His fingers twitch.

Eugene rolls onto his other side and pulls his blanket up around his neck.

 

*

 

It's a balmy morning and the sun's barely even up, but John has them all out on the lawn already, lined up in pairs to sit next to each other on the minivan into town. They're supposed to be boy-girl, and Laura May had made a beeline for Eugene in the second John had announced it. He doesn't especially mind Laura May's company; she smells nice and doesn't talk a lot. Glancing back down the line, he can see Merriell a few pairs back, arms folded tightly against himself while Susanna, outweighed by her mess of mousy brown curls, talks his ear off. He looks up as if he can feel Eugene looking at him, and he looks so trapped that Eugene can't help grinning as he turns around again.

"What's so funny?" Laura May asks. She has very blue eyes. Eugene just shakes his head, trying to swallow back his smile.

John pulls around the minivan and everyone starts to pile in. Eugene gets the window seat. They'd agreed that Laura May would have it on the way back, but she hasn't even clambered into the van before Merriell nudges past her and takes the seat that should be hers. Eugene looks at him quizzically. "We're supposed to be—"

"Don't. No way I'm sittin' with Miss Won't-Shut-Up for forty-five goddamn minutes."

Merriell won't be moved, and John either hasn't noticed or doesn't mind, so the only thing for Laura May to do is sit down next to Susanna. Eugene nudges his backpack under the seat in front of him to give Merriell more space. The only thing Merriell has with him is his Walkman, which he balances on his lap as he's untangling his headphone cable. The minivan has only just set off when Eugene's hit with a wave of jealousy, concrete rather than abstract, as John starts them all off singing _This Little Light of Mine_. They circle around a few songs, hitting the highway, before Merriell nudges him in the arm.

"What?"

Silently, Merriell peels off his headphones and holds them out to him, lips quirked up at one corner. "You look like you're gonna scream."

"I feel like I'm about to," Eugene says quietly, almost a whisper, like a confession. "What're you listening to?"

Merriell just wiggles the headphones insistently, leaving Eugene little choice other than to take them and slip them over his ears. Whatever he'd been expecting, it wasn't Nina Simone. He sinks back against the seat, shutting his eyes after a moment, laughing in spite of himself and he can hear the sound over the music. Merriell's knee nudges against his.

He sits quietly through three songs before he reasons he's being selfish and hooks the headphones off his ears, holding them between them. The hymns have dwindled into quiet conversation, someone playing I Spy near the back of the van. Merriell takes the headphones back but doesn't put them on.

"I didn't know you listened to her," Eugene says, voice low. This isn't a conversation he feels anyone else has a right to be listening to.

Merriell matches his volume. "I live to break expectations."

"I don't know what I expected. I thought you just listened to – loud music."

"Sometimes." Their knees bump against each other again as the van turns a corner. "Gets all the other stuff out of my head."

"You know," Eugene says, and he's really whispering now, and Merriell leans forward so he can still hear, "you know, there's a lot of music you're not supposed to have."

"Yeah, I know. They took a bunch of my tapes already. My first day, I was in the doctor lady's office and she had all my shit spread out on her desk and she was just tossin' it in the garbage. I saved up for those tapes."

Eugene chews his bottom lip for a moment. "How'd you keep the ones you have? Are they – Christian rock or somethin'?" Even as he says it, it sounds absurd. He smiles and Merriell follows it with his own wobbly grin. "You hid them."

Merriell lifts his eyebrows. "Won't tell you where," he says, and winks.

Something about the quietness of their voices catches Eugene's good humour and he laughs, pressing a hand over his mouth, dipping his head down. "That's so gross. That's not funny, Merriell."

"Why you laughin' at it, then?" Merriell asks. Eugene looks up and there's barely anything between their faces, and a flush over the tops of Merriell's cheekbones that he hasn't seen before. It puts some warmth into his skin, makes him look younger; for the first time Eugene really believes they're both seventeen.

"Because." He doesn't have an answer. Merriell's eyelashes are thick and dark and up close Eugene can see he has freckles, pinpricks over the bridge of his nose. Merriell lifts his eyebrows, a silent prompt. Eugene decides on, "You're awful."

"You're laughin' 'cause I'm awful? I see. Share my headphones with you and this is what I get. _You awful, Merriell_. I'll bear that in mind." He sits back in his seat with a sense of finality, a smile still tugging at his mouth.

Eugene looks away too, out of the window. When he looks back Merriell is wrapping up his headphones, so he figures it won't be an intrusion to ask something. "Where's your name come from? I've never known anyone called Merriell before."

Merriell sniffs and looks up a little late as he's stuffing the Walkman back into his jacket pocket. "I dunno. I don't think it comes from anywhere. My mama made it up, I guess."

"It's more interesting than Eugene."

"It sounds like a girl's name. I dunno why she put so much effort into mine, she ain't never given a fuck about nobody else's. She had twins, they ended up with the same name, near enough."

Twins, a brother, two sisters. Eugene says, a little hesitantly, "How many siblings do you _have_?"

"Six. Four brothers, two sisters." He starts to tick them off on his fingers: "Augustin, Charlie, Charly, Ansel, Denis, Fanny."

"And you're the youngest?"

"Mhm."

Eugene wrinkles his nose, trying to imagine five more Edwards, all of them older than him. It doesn't bear thinking about. "Which one's the one I saw?"

"Ansel." He says the name darkly, brow furrowed. "He's a real sonuvabitch. He's twenty-six and he still lives in my mama's basement."

"Wow." Edward is six years older than him and it feels like a decade, most days. "That's why he came with?"

"He came 'cause he's my mama's fuckin' attack dog. She don't gotta exert herself tryna wrangle me if he's there."

Eugene thinks about his own mother, who treats him more often than not like a china doll, already cracked and meticulously glued back together. Sometimes, when he's feeling particularly homesick, he finds himself mad at her for letting go of her fear of breaking him. She must've struggled long and hard to come to terms with this, sending him away, but at least he's at God's Hope, under the watchful gaze of the Lord. Eugene heaves out a breath and clears his throat. "My brother's just a busybody. He's always sticking his nose in places where it doesn't belong. He thinks he knows so much better."

Glancing back over at Merriell, Eugene presses his lips together in the face of Merriell's smile. It's not quite mocking, the way he's seen it so far, and maybe he's deluding himself or there might be a hint of sympathy to his gaze. Merriell shrugs. "Guess we all got our tests."

They fall into a strange silence after that. The strangeness of it lies in the fact that it doesn't feel strange at all. There's a clarity to it that Eugene feels comfortable in, and Merriell's only really looking at him every now and then. If he concentrates, he can zero in on the conversation in the seats behind them, Susanna halfway through a story about going to DisneyWorld and seeing Cinderella some parade or another, Laura May interjecting now and then with noises of surprise and awe. He's only been away from home for a little over a week at this point and to his numb, mutable surprise, he doesn't really miss it. There are isolated sparks of longing, for his bedroom or his father's quiet, stoic company and sometimes his mother, who for all her faults is the only person who really knows how to soothe him. But he doesn't miss Edward, and he doesn't miss Mobile. The only feeling of constant loss, like a limb torn off, is the throbbing emptiness left by Deacon's absence. When they'd talked this all through, his father quiet as usual, his mother saying everything for the both of them, the only real objection Eugene had had was leaving Deacon behind. He's always been for all intents and purposes Eugene's dog, not the family's: he was the one who saved up his allowance for months, who rode home from the shelter with him in the basket of his bike; he trained him not to jump on the sofas, to pee in the garden, to bark on command, to sit and heel and roll over and play dead. Before this, the longest he'd ever been away from Deacon was two days, when he'd stayed over at Sid's for a whole weekend.

Sid. He supposes he does miss Sid, too.

Eugene presses his head against the window and the van's vibrations rattle through him, chattering his teeth until he grits them together, and then out of nowhere he feels a sharp thump of pain on his upper arm and looks up to see Merriell with his hand in a fist, looking right back at him. He rubs at the spot he'd hit, which feels tender and liable to bruise. " _Ow_. What was that for?"

Merriell blinks. "Yellow car," he says, as if it's obvious.

 

*

 

It's not that they have any money to be spending, but in the hour they have to themselves in town before they're all supposed to meet up again for milkshakes, Eugene ends up in a used book store. Lyedale is little more than a single main street, with a single Italian restaurant breaking up the row of knick-knack stores and small, beige cafés. The bookstore itself is tiny and poky, hard to breathe in, but the lady behind the counter waves at him when he jingles the bell above the door as he's coming in and he waves back. He ends up sandwiched between shelves of pre-owned novels, somewhere in the A to F section, running his index finger over the backs of the spines.

He'd brought a book with him, and of course they have a small library back at God's Hope, but all of their books are either biblical, close enough to the Bible that they might as well be the same, or children's literature. Eugene tips his head to one side to read the title on one of the spines and notices something move out of the corner of his eye. When he lifts his head up nobody's there. He blinks and turns back to the shelf, but he's barely had time to register an author's name before there's a shuffling noise as the books he's looking at suddenly part like the Red Sea and an eye appears between them, wide and blue-grey.

"Hey, Eugene." Merriell lifts up onto his toes so his mouth is visible in the small gap. "Whatcha doin'?"

Eugene smiles, tight and small; he's trying to clamp down on it. "What's it look like? Browsin'."

"You gonna buy somethin'?"

"I don't have any money."

"Me neither. Coupla scrubs, ain't we?" He lands back on his heels in time for Eugene to see him blink. He has his fingers hooked against the covers of the books to keep them apart, and Eugene leans forward, his nose breaching the space. Under the slight smell of mildew and dust, he catches Merriell's scent too, the same soap they all use but twisted with something just different enough that it stands out. It's hard to place. After a moment, Merriell lets go of one of the books, but it doesn't topple. He fumbles with something on the other side of the shelf and then places it on the surface, pushing it across to Eugene under his index finger. "Here."

It's a quarter. Eugene looks down at it and then back up at Merriell, brow furrowed. "Why're you givin' it to me?"

Like it means absolutely nothing at all, "Seen you read the same book a million times already and I'm gettin' second-hand sick of it."

Eugene's eyes stick on it for a second before he's looking back at Merriell. "Are you sure? What if you find somethin' later you wanna buy?"

"Shit, Eugene, don't sound too excited. If you don't want it—"

Panicking a little, Eugene reaches into the small gap and grasps for the quarter, holding it tightly in his fist. It's warm; Merriell must have been holding it the same way. "Thanks."

He can tell Merriell shrugs by the way his head moves. "'S a'ight. Don't sweat it."

Eugene waits a moment before he steps away from the shelf. Suddenly, nothing he's looking at seems worth spending a quarter on. He could get two of the three _Lord of the Rings_ books and have five cents left over, or a crisp new copy of _The Prestige_ whose bargain price seems exclusively due to the fact that it's definitely been dropped in a bath. _The Grapes of Wrath_ , a hardback, no less. _Wuthering Heights_ without a front cover, the pages yellowed. It takes him fifteen minutes to come to the conclusion that he doesn't want anything, or at least he doesn't want anything with enough intensity to warrant spending Merriell's quarter.

Merriell's sitting on the tiny round ottoman by the door by the time Eugene emerges from the shelves, feeling dusty and slightly embarrassed. "What'd you get?" he asks as he's standing up, hands diving into his pockets.

"—nothin'." He holds out the quarter a little meekly, ready to drop it back into Merriell's open palm. "Here, you have it."

Merriell eyes him with his head canted a little to one side. He's not smiling, but the angle of his head lends a sense of familiarity. "Why you so hot on givin' it back to me?"

"Because – it's yours. And you gave it to me. And I'm not spendin' it. So here." He gestures with it, insistently.

"I found it on the ground, Eugene, it wasn't never mine. Just keep it. Maybe you'll find somethin' to use it for."

Eugene doesn't really feel all that happy about putting the quarter back in his pocket, but it's Merriell's apparently genuine disinterest in it that finally pushes him in that direction. He presses his lips together, trying not to look put-out. It's kind of him, at its core; it's a kind thing to do, and squabbling gently over who wants it the least isn't doing either of them any favours. Merriell steps outside first, Eugene hot on his heels. He taps Merriell on the arm to get his attention as they're heading back up the main street towards the café John had earmarked for milkshakes. "Thank you."

"I told you, it's—"

"Really, I mean it."

Merriell looks over his shoulder, looking mollified in the face of Eugene's sincerity. "It's fine. Don't get weird about it."

At the café, Merriell asks for a strawberry milkshake and Eugene sticks with vanilla. The lady swirls in caramel free of charge, and maybe he's just used to the vegetables and boiled chicken they always tend to eat at camp, but for a few sips it tastes too sweet. Eugene ends up on a table outside, squeezed next to Laura May, while Merriell sits on the edge of the sidewalk with his legs pulled up to his chest.

"Susanna and I are gonna sit together on the way back," Laura May tells him. He looks up from his milkshake a little too late, so she continues before he can reply, "It's not that I don't wanna sit next to you, Eugene."

"It's okay." He lifts his shoulder in a half-shrug and presses his hand into his jacket pocket, his fingers finding the quarter after a moment's struggle, pushing aside a few small balls of lint. "I don't mind."

"You and him are quite good friends already, aren't you?" she asks. She puts her lips around the end of her straw and sucks, and Eugene furrows his brow as he's watching her. "I guess you'd have to be, since you're roommates and all."

He doesn't know what else he's supposed to say to that, so he just nods and says, "Yeah."

"Well, I think it's nice," Laura May continues, wiping her bottom lip with her thumb and smiling. "It's such a responsibility, especially because he tried to run away. I would've been so scared he would interrupt all my hard work if he'd been roomed with me."

Eugene looks down at the surface of his milkshake, creamy white and streaked with a syrupy golden brown. He stirs it absently with his straw. "The only person that can really get in the way is you."

It seems to stymy her, or maybe she's just sipping. Eugene mirrors her. Over by the sidewalk, he can hear a protracted rattling noise, the sound of Merriell reaching the bottom of his glass, licking his lips when he's done. Wiping his bottom lip with his thumb, licking again. Swallowing thickly. Catching his bottom lip between his teeth and holding it there.

Eugene clears his throat and curls his fingers tightly around the quarter, flushing pink up to his ears.

 

*

 

Merriell always finishes eating earlier than the rest of them. Eugene's used to seeing him flat out on his bed with his Walkman on his chest by the time he's finished eating, but today when he gets back from dinner, there's something on his own pillow and Merriell's bed is empty. He almost doesn't notice the object at first; it's nearly the same colour as his pillowcase, and Merriell's absence is at first glance more striking. Eugene sits on the edge of his bed and picks it up: a pencil case, brand new, periwinkle blue with a white plastic zip. The pencil case that he'd broken in the squabble with Merriell has been relegated to the corner of his desk and after a long moment of staring at this new one, Eugene gets up and moves over to swap his pencils out.

It bothers him that he doesn't know where this thing came from, but not enough not to want to use it. It's clean and crisp and Merriell left it there for him, another sign of goodwill, another gift. The quarter was still in his jacket pocket until that morning when he'd wanted to go somewhere without it, at which point without thinking he'd reached in, grabbed it, and moved it to the pocket of his shorts, where it still is. His old pencil case ends up in the bin without a thought, and then he has nothing to do with his hands.

Merriell's side of the room is messier than his. He's barely unpacked properly, and the clothes he wears end up spread about over the floor and under his bed more often than they end up in his hamper. Eugene lets his fingers spring away from his pencil case and then roll up around it again. Something about the proximity, something about Merriell's absence, makes him trail across the room and stop at the foot of Merriell's bed. The rest of the space looks different from over here, bigger somehow. Merriell's bedside table is clear except for an empty plastic cup and his Walkman, the cord of the headphones wound tightly around it.

Eugene sits down on the edge of his bed, which seems more resistant than his own, less prone to creaking. He sets his pencil case down beside him and reaches for the Walkman, methodically unfurling the cord, fumbling for a moment with the controls until he works out how to turn it on. It seems like his thumb has only just depressed the play button when a torrent of tinny noise spits out of the headphones, still in his lap, and he flinches. It's not Nina Simone this time; whatever it is, he doesn't recognise it. After a moment of indecision, he picks up the headphones and slips them on, assaulted with pure, angry noise. Almost immediately, he takes them off again, reaching for the player to hit the stop button, but before he can even locate it the music cuts out abruptly, right in the middle, unnatural. He jabs at the play button a few more times, an uneasy feeling rising in his throat. It has to be the batteries, it's the only thing that makes sense. Merriell's been using this thing almost constantly ever since he got here, but of course the batteries have run out in the few seconds it took for Eugene to let his curiosity get the better of him. He puts the player aside and reaches automatically for the drawer in Merriell's bedside table, hoping in some small, unenthusiastic way that he'll find spare batteries in there.

It's empty, or at least that's how it looks at first. After a cursory pat around towards the back, Eugene's fingers touch a scrunched-up piece of paper, which he rolls out and unfurls. It's Merriell's iceberg. The second he registers what he's looking at, his eyes dart away, and then, after a moment where he acknowledges that he's experiencing an impulse and that he's going to follow through on it, he looks back. Unlike Eugene's iceberg, there's only one person's handwriting on this; by process of elimination it has to be Merriell's, an unyielding, tight chickenscratch that Eugene has to decipher by leaning close to the page and tracing the letters with the tip of his index finger.

_Gender confusion because I_ ~~ _want to be_ ~~ _like my sister_

_Something about sports_

_Merriell is a_ ~~ _girl's_~~ ~~_girly_~~ _weird name_

_My dad is never around and when he is all I think about is how he stinks of fish_

_I miss Fanny_

_This is so fucking stupid_

_I like boys because I like boys because I like boys because I like boys because I like_

_I'm afraid of my mother_

"What the fuck are you doin'?"

Of course, of course, it's Merriell. Eugene feels his heart actually skip a beat, and the beat itself seems to get lost for a second inside his body before coalesces into something solid and drops like a stone into his stomach, leaving a horrible sinking feeling in its wake. Merriell's already seen him, but something makes Eugene scrunch up the iceberg and aim it for the open drawer again, as if somehow that'll make things better. He stands up and grabs the pencil case, clutching it tightly in his fist like a weapon.

"Your Walkman ran out of—"

"Stop it." Merriell's expression is caught somewhere between dispassion and anger and it shows on his face as nothing, maybe something, a slight twitch in his lip, his eyes wide and unblinking. "Why're you touchin' my stuff?"

The guilt rushing through Eugene's body gathers together and sucks itself out through his pores, so violently it feels almost physical, and he's left fumbling for a moment with newfound indignation. "Why'd you touch _mine_?"

"The stuff on your desk. Not in your _drawer_." Merriell says it with such conviction that for a second Eugene can't come up with a counter-argument and he stands there, frozen in place, until he realises what a stupid thing it is that Merriell's trying to insinuate.

He presses a breath out through his nose. "It doesn't matter where I put my stuff, you can't just touch it."

Merriell folds his arms across his chest and bugs his eyes out, drawling out an, "Uh huh?" in a tone that seems tailor-made to expose Eugene's stupidity. There's no way he can win this fight by shoving the blame off onto Merriell's past transgressions, and in the grand scheme of things maybe it's true that Eugene's overstep is worse because he'd ignored a closed door, broken a barrier. Maybe it would be best if he just —

"Sorry."

"Uh huh," Merriell says again, flatter this time.

"I'm sorry."

"I heard."

"I just wanted to listen to your Walkman."

"Uh huh."

"And – it ran out of power."

"That'll happen."

"I thought you might've had spares in your drawer."

"Makes sense."

"And then I found your iceberg."

"So you read it."

Eugene chews the inside of his cheek. Merriell's staring at him, but strangely the look is void of expectation. He doesn't even seem like he's waiting for a reply, and as Eugene struggles with what to say, he crosses the room and sits down on his bed, prising the back cover off his Walkman and popping out the two batteries.

"You didn't do a very good job with it," Eugene says eventually. "Your iceberg."

Merriell doesn't look up. "I don't care about my stupid iceberg."

Eugene's thumb presses along the seam of the pencil case and he takes a step back, another and another, until he hits Merriell's desk and leans against it. "Don't you want to get better?"

"I'm not sick," Merriell says plainly. He turns a little, aims briefly, and tosses a battery towards the bin. It makes an empty, short, clattering sound as it hits the base.

"You have same-sex attraction."

"It ain't a disease." It might just be the way Eugene is hearing it, but Merriell's voice has taken on a wearied, slightly prosaic tone, like he's doling out advice he's given a hundred times before, so rote he doesn't even have to think about what he's saying. By contrast, Eugene is double-checking every word he says before he's about to say it, an irritated flush rising on his cheeks and only becoming more opaque the angrier he gets that it's sticking around.

"But you can get rid of it." To his own ears, Eugene feels like he's starting to sound desperate. He doesn't want to sound desperate. Searching for whatever thin streak of confidence he can find, he latches onto it and tries again, with the one arrow in his quiver that he knows will always shoot straight. "John used to have same-sex attraction. And now he doesn't. He's married to a woman."

"Yeah?" At first it sounds for a second like Eugene's onto something, but then Merriell turns to look at him and in retrospect his tone had been patronising at best. It's clear from the way his eyebrows have shifted upwards and he's eyeing Eugene with open pity. "Yeah, Eugene. 'Cause no marriage has ever been built on anythin' other than mutual love and affection." He puts down his gutted Walkman and shakes his head a little. "Either you're the stupidest person on the planet or you spend ninety-nine percent of your day lyin' to yourself. Nobody's that naïve."

"I'm not naïve," Eugene snaps at him almost immediately.

"You smell that, Eugene?" Merriell looks up, sniffing curiously, and for a second Eugene is pulled into his pantomime before he says, coolly, "Smells like denial to me."

Rushing to cover up the embarrassment that settles in him the longer Merriell leaves that hanging, Eugene snaps, "You're the one in denial. It's like you don't even know how disgusting it is. It's disgusting. _You're_ disgusting. At least I want to change."

The weight of the words only settles on him once they're all out, and the longer they linger in the silence, the easier it is to recognise that he might have said too much. Merriell stares at him for a moment, and then nudges his Walkman aside and lies down on his back, clasps his hands together over his stomach and goes still, like he's waiting patiently for Eugene to present his next ineffectual line of reasoning. It doesn't come, and the longer he stands here, leaning against Merriell's desk, the more aware of himself he becomes; the sound of his own breathing, the clicking in his throat when he swallows.

The silence stretches, and at some point – it could be a minute or twenty later – Merriell rolls his head to one side to look at him and says, "Okay, Eugene," with such utter finality that the conversation can't be anything but over.

 

*

 

It's hard to get to sleep that night. Merriell is still and unyielding in his bed; they haven't spoken since Merriell's final word, and there's so much Eugene wants to ask. If he hadn't pressed about the iceberg, maybe it wouldn't feel like pulling teeth to even try to will up the energy to ask where he got the pencil case from, or where he'd been after dinner. Eugene turns his back to Merriell in bed and pulls his covers over his head. On his way to bed he'd rescued the quarter from his pocket and he still has it now, glinting lunately like his own personal moon.

Whatever Merriell has to say about his same-sex attraction, Eugene knows he has to stick to his guns. It had been hard to think straight in the moment, in the face of Merriell's full-body apathy, but now, hidden from the world and from Merriell by the sheath of his blanket, it's easy to plot out how it should have gone. He should have said that naïveté had nothing to do with it, that it was Merriell's sins and errors in judgement that had clouded him from the truth of the matter, and that if either one of them is naïve, it's Merriell, who has made no real effort to change or better himself, who scoffs atevery mass, every Bible reading, every activity they try, every task he's set to do. If it's true that he's afraid of his mother, then it's far simpler for him than it is for a lot of the others here. He's afraid of women, of girls, because he's afraid of her.

A bubble of sympathy pops in Eugene's belly as he's thinking it over. He can't imagine being afraid of his mother. Annoyed by her, embarrassed by her, angry with her, but never afraid of her. In the brief glimpse of Merriell's mother that he'd been exposed to, she'd watched impassively as he was manhandled back to the camp, and then hit him the second he was close enough. He still thinks about her sometimes, clutching at her shawl, the rings on her fingers glinting, gold with dark stones, red and blue and black. As an exercise in empathy, he tries to imagine what it might be like, growing up in a house with six other children, an apparently absent father, and a mother he's afraid of. Maybe they had to share bedrooms, squabble over belongings and clothes. A lot of the things Merriell wears are old and worn and too big on him, so it stands to reason that, the youngest of five boys, he's dressing almost exclusively in hand-me-downs.

Eugene shuffles under the covers and turns over, peeking out from under his blanket. Merriell hasn't moved an inch, but as Eugene watches, he shifts and rolls onto his side, open eyes catching the light leaking in through the thin fabric of the curtains. For a second they just stare at each other. Eugene scrambles to think about what he should say, if he should mention Merriell's mother specifically or talk about parents in general and let Merriell come to the conclusion on his own. It'll be a difficult act to balance but if he's careful and methodical about it, maybe he'll be able to walk the line.

He has his mouth open, a breath sucked in, ready to say something, when Merriell cuts over him and says, firm, "Go to sleep."

Eugene slumps against his pillow, watching as Merriell turns over again, his back to him. He draws a hand over his face and places the quarter down onto his mattress, eyeing it from between his fingers. It's still there when he wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this really was only going to be something short but it ended up getting way longer than i expected it to and i quickly realised i wasn't going to have the whole thing done on time but i wanted to post something for sledgefu week and dip my toes in the fandom for real. SO i'm compromising by posting this kinda unfinished (sorry), since the third chapter which i'm yet to actually finish is just some closure to the story because well. i mean you'll see.
> 
> ANYWAY i haven't written fic in a thousand years so i'm a little out of practice, but i actually have some other sledgefu things in the works so i might be around here again! if you wanna keep up with my stuff, my tumblr is [@rocinante](https://rocinante.tumblr.com/) but i also have a dedicated hbo war sideblog [@merriellshelton](https://merriellshelton.tumblr.com/) too!
> 
> the title of this is from [_the phone book_ by editors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8leM1N6zKw) which has always been a sledgefu song for me generally anyway so CHECK it out because it's lovely.
> 
> thank you for reading!! Xx


	2. two

Eugene and Merriell have been existing in a strange sort of stasis for the last two weeks or so, ever since their odd, heartless squabble over Merriell's iceberg. It isn't that they aren't speaking to each other, they just aren't talking. Merriell will ask if Eugene has seen a certain t-shirt of his, or if he noticed where he'd put down his toothbrush, and in return Eugene will tell him, but the conversation always ends there. It's their bedroom to sleep in, but not really to share; if Eugene is reading, Merriell won't come in to listen to his music, and vice versa. Maybe this is the way it should be. Maybe it was silly of Eugene to try to make friends.

Whatever the case may be, Eugene figures that he's been spending far too much time with Merriell, and worse, that it's impacting his recovery. With Merriell largely out of the picture, he throws himself into his sessions with Dr Harlow and, after some advice from her, decides that it's time to properly reach out to some of the others. He's been putting too much on his own shoulders, thinking of himself as responsible for Merriell too, and it's not working.

They spend a lot of time outside the classroom. Today, for example, John wants them to make some art for the walls in the cafeteria, and since there's little to no breeze and no resultant worry that their supplies will fly off, he lets them sit out in the shade to draw. It feels a little childish, all the same, but Eugene doesn't mind the distraction. He sits close by Laura May, who's cutting out shapes from different coloured papers to layer up into a scene.

She leans close to look over his shoulder at what he's drawing. "Is that your dog?"

He nods. "His name's Deacon."

"You're really good," she says after another moment of looking. "Did you learn?"

"Not really. I used to draw a bunch when I was a kid. Not so much now." There's an itchy feeling at the back of his neck, a slight tickle, almost burning. There's only really one thing that can be causing it: Merriell's stare. He's out here too, sitting on his own, wedged into the roots of a tree with a pad of paper resting on his legs. It doesn't matter that they haven't been talking; the one reliable constant in this place is that Merriell will be staring at him. He doesn't need to turn around and seek out Merriell under the tree to know he's right.

Laura May says, with a kind of disinterest that's immediately suspect, "Did you hear about the party?"

Eugene looks up from his page. "No, what party?"

"John said he's thinkin' about puttin' one together, just some music and snacks and things. Kinda like a little prom, 'cause he heard some of us are missin' ours." She presses her lips together and then puts down her scissors. "And, um, I was wonderin' if maybe, if – if it happens, if you'd like to go with me. As a date." Eugene feels his eyebrows lifting up as she's talking, they must've disappeared under his fringe by the time she stops. She's pink over the apples of her cheeks, and she adds hurriedly, "You don't have to if you—"

"Yes," he says, a little breathlessly. "Yes, I'll be your date."

"Oh—" Her worried expression breaks into a relieved smile and she leans over, throwing her arms around him somewhat awkwardly. She laughs and he laughs. She holds him for a moment, smelling like the rest of them do but with a sweet, slightly artificial floral scent pasted over top, which he assumes is a perfume. It's not unpleasant. When she pulls away he chances turning around to Merriell's tree; his brow furrows when he sees it empty and unoccupied, the pad of paper he'd been doodling in left abandoned, propped up against the trunk. Eugene lifts a hand and rubs the back of his neck; his skin feels hot, and he flushes out of a strange sense of shame, wondering as he goes back to his drawing if Merriell had been staring at him at all, or if he'd just been sat under a patch of sunlight.

 

*

 

Dr Harlow tells them not to look at their partner, but rather somewhere else, at the trees or the sky or the ground, if it's easier to talk or listen that way. Eugene can still see Laura May out of the corner of his eye, a blur of wispy blonde hair, so he turns his head until she's entirely gone, and he's looking out across the camp.

Laura May says, "I wanted to be an ice skater. My whole life. I thought it was just the prettiest thing in the world to look at, you know? Just so perfect and smooth. My daddy worked extra hours to pay for lessons for me and I went almost every day after school, most weekends too. Every day when I got to the rink, there was this girl in the changin' room, Katie. She'd be leavin' whenever I was comin' in. She looked just like Jodie Foster. I thought she was just so pretty. I'd stay late sometimes to watch her and y'know, I thought I was doin' such a good job of keepin' it quiet, but one day I was sittin' in the stands and this lady comes up to me. She tells me that I've been creepin' on her daughter for too long and that she's spoken with the man who owns the buildin', and that he's under strict instructions not to let me come back and practice any more." Eugene's eyes flit back towards her; she's looking down at her hands in her lap, pink-faced, the braid that usually goes down her back curled over her shoulder and hanging limply. A pause stretches out and snaps when she lifts up her head and says, brightly, "So – that's when my same-sex attraction got in the way of my goals. How about you, Eugene?"

 

*

 

It's always hot at God's Hope, but the temperature reaches its apex around a month after Merriell's arrival, high summer firmly established in long, balmy days and warm, wet nights, cloudless skies all around. John takes them on another trip into Lyedale and Eugene spends the journey sitting next to Laura May. Her mother passed when she was two years old and she thinks that her same-sex attraction has come from a lack of mother figures in her life, which Eugene thinks makes sense. They spend their hour of free time at the café, Laura May filling out a crossword while Eugene reads a book. It's comfortable, friendly, warm. He finds himself enjoying the time, not having to second-guess everything he says, never hit by uncomfortable red-cheeked flushes of embarrassment, never struck suddenly by horrible, lewd imaginings. Laura May licks her lips and he barely even thinks about it. It feels like improvement.

Right now, it's another hot night and Eugene's given up on his blanket, which ends up scrunched at the foot of his bed. He rolls onto his back and puffs out a sigh. According to his clock, it's just gone two in the morning. He kicks his feet a little into his balled-up blanket, hot and uncomfortable and annoyed about it. It's always been harder for him to sleep when it's hot; everything becomes unpleasant, too close, and the heat seems to rise up, out from inside him, to paint his whole body pink.

"Couldn't splurge on a fan or nothin'," a voice says suddenly, and the resultant shock of it makes Eugene tense up sharply. Stupid of him, but he'd almost forgotten that Merriell was even in the room. He turns his head over in Merriell's direction, parting the imaginary curtain he'd hung up between them since they hadn't been talking, and reigsters him sitting up with his legs crossed, down to his underwear. He's bare-chested and his skin has a sort of sheen to it, caught by the moonlight.

Eugene clears his throat. "I guess not."

"Maybe they think we're gonna sweat out the same-sex attraction," Merriell says, with just enough of a smile that Eugene could choose to read it as hopeful rather than joking.

Eugene turns onto his side after a moment, lifting up to flip his pillow and press his cheek to the cool side. The relief, though brief, is unimaginable. "I can't believe how much I miss air-con. I can't think of anythin' I wouldn't do to sit in a cold room right now."

He thinks he'd be able to hear the smile in Merriell's voice even if he wasn't looking at it when Merriell says, "Take a dump in Dr Harlow's desk drawer?"

Eugene gives it some thought. "I think she'd understand."

"She'd have to, huh. The look on her face…" Merriell trails off, grinning. Eugene kicks at his blanket again like a dog trying to settle itself on its bed and eventually rolls onto his front, tucking his head sideways against the pillow so he's still looking at Merriell. Merriell's smile has shrunk down and disappeared, though the good humour is still there.

"I missed talkin' to you," Eugene says, surprising himself. It seems to have surprised Merriell too, because for a moment he doesn't say anything, and Eugene is left with his words hanging slightly awkwardly in the air, suspended.

"Yeah. Me too." Merriell pauses for a moment and then eases down onto his back, his head tipped sideways. He maintains such unnerving eye contact that it's hard to keep looking back, but Eugene's trying. "Seen you gettin' cosy with Laura May."

"I'm goin' to the party with her," Eugene says, a hint of pride in his voice. "She asked me last week." John had gathered them all together a few days beforehand to make the official announcement, that it would be happening in the second week of August on account of everyone's good behaviour and progress, and that they'd have time now to call their parents and ask for any special clothes they might want. Eugene doesn't know what he's going to wear, but having a date already organised is taking a lot of the pressure away.

"Hey, look at you," Merriell says. There's not much enthusiasm in his voice, but then again, there never really is. Eugene feels like he's only just getting to know him properly all over again; their extended spat wiped away a lot of the progress in that direction, but it's coming back easier the second time around. "You done with all this same-sex attraction business for good?"

Eugene looks at him carefully. It's hard to read his expression in this low light, but what he can see of it looks fairly impassive. "It's a process," he says eventually, shrugging modestly. "Dr Harlow says I'm doing well. That's all I can hope for."

Merriell blinks. "Congratulations." Inexplicably, he pulls his blanket up over his shoulders. Just looking at him makes Eugene feel stifled and sweaty all over again. "How come you ended up here in the first place?" he asks suddenly. "Did you get caught with someone, or—?"

"Sorta." Eugene isn't sure if he should be telling this, but if it helps Merriell, then there's no reason to pull back. "I had this friend. Sidney." And under Merriell's unblinking stare, he relays the entire story, as best as he can. He and Sid had practically shared a cradle, growing up at exactly the same time. It made sense that they'd stay friends, since the Phillips family lived closest to the Sledges' house, and Eugene's parents loved Sid. It wasn't that it had been hard for Eugene to make friends, but Sid had stayed by and large his only one for years because Eugene didn't really see the need to make friends with anyone else. His mother had been worried about it, in the way that all mothers are, but not enough to push him into anything, and in any case, Sid had always been more of a talker than Eugene. Sid made friends and they were his, but he'd drag Eugene along with him whenever they all went out together, so it was like Eugene had more friends that way. As they got older, they never really drifted, not like his mother had worried, and though they'd reached the age where it wasn't really cool any more, their tradition for sleepovers never dwindled. It was a sleepover at Eugene's house that had been the first time; he glosses over this in the telling of it, because he doesn't want to linger, but he remembers it all very clearly. Sid sitting very near, the two of them looking at each other closely, Eugene's eyes catching every one of Sid's freckles. Sid was the first person Eugene had ever kissed and it didn't go very well; their teeth clashed, noses bumping awkwardly, but it was a kiss and it felt nice, even comfortable. Neither of them really talked about it, but then they didn't need to talk. It just made sense.

It didn't stop after the sleepover; the next day they'd been playing a video game on Edward's PlayStation, and after a long silence, Sid looked over and asked if Eugene wanted to make out, and they went up to his bedroom and Eugene very, very gently shut the door behind them. Everything turned into a distraction, a prelude, with the ultimate goal of having a closed door between them and the rest of the world. Maybe he shouldn't have let himself get so comfortable in the routine, but it was always so nice to be that close to someone, to have hands in his hair, someone to touch. It lasted a few months, a few blissful, peaceful months of comfort and closeness, and then Eugene had come home from school one day and opened his bedroom door to see Edward sitting on the end of his bed, his expression serious. They hadn't really talked for long, less than ten minutes, and Eugene hadn't really been able to get a word in edgeways. Suffice it to say that Edward had seen what he and Sid were up to, and he wasn't impressed by it, and if Eugene didn't tell their parents so that something could be done, then Edward would tell them himself.

Sitting downstairs at the kitchen table and telling his mother what had been going on – Eugene hasn't lived long in the grand scheme of things, but he doubts he'll ever experience something as awful as that again, not as long as he lives. He hadn't really been looking at her face, but it wasn't long into his telling of the story that she'd started to cry, real and awful shuddering sobs, and that had been unbearable. He'd started too, long streams of tears spilling out as he'd reached across the table to touch her hand, only for her to snatch it away from him and cover her mouth.

More long conversations at the kitchen table, Sid's presence effectively wiped out of his life, and now he's here. He stops talking and looks up; he'd been picking small pills of cotton from the sheet over his mattress as he talked, but now he has nothing more to say the action holds no interest for him. Merriell is looking right back, his mouth bunched up into a scowl as he chews his bottom lip.

"Shit," he says eventually. He looks slightly mollified. "Your brother's a real jackass."

For a second Eugene wants to defend him. He wants to say that Edward helped, that he wanted to make things better for him, but then he thinks back to that conversation in his bedroom and the unmistakeable look of gloating that had coated Edward's face as he'd sworn on their mother's life that he'd tell if Eugene didn't. He'd wanted the satisfaction more than anything else. "I know," he says, around a rueful smile.

"I remember you sayin' he was nosy, but _fuck_." Merriell shakes his head. "That blows ass."

Eugene stretches out a leg, lets it drop off the edge of his bed. "What about you?"

"What about me?"

"How'd _you_ end up here?" Eugene watches Merriell's face shift, guarded, and says, "I just told you mine. Come on."

"—a'ight, fine." Merriell clears his throat, his lips pulled into a pout for a moment before he says, "My mama ain't a Christian or nothin', she just thinks I'm fucked up." He sniffs, clears his throat again. "She don't like Christians but she likes me less. I think she just wanted me outta the house. Don't mistake it, she thinks I'm a disgustin' freak 'cause I like boys, but havin' a reason to send me to camp for the summer is just like, a bonus."

"How'd she find out?" Eugene asks, but he has a feeling he already knows the answer judging by what Merriell's told him so far.

"Ansel," Merriell says easily, and Eugene nods. "When I was like, thirteen or somethin', I got three trolleys and a bus into to Baton Rouge. Took me 'bout two hours to get there. My mama never gave none of us an allowance, she couldn't afford it, but my uncle Henley used to give me money whenever he came by. I saved up for months. I had breakfast at the bus station an' my lunch in Baton Rouge. Big bowl of jambalaya an' a can of coke. Walked around lookin' in all the stores. An' while I was there I bought this – military magazine. Like, the least gay shit you could possibly read. All this shit 'bout how to clean your AEGs and whatever the fuck. I wanted a magazine with guys in it, just to look at 'em, y'know? But I didn't wanna go to the register with some genuine gay porn, 'cause my mama knows everyone. She used to clean rich people's houses 'til her hands got sore off of the Lysol. I got myself so worked up about it, it just made sense in my head that somehow she knew the register lady and she'd recognise me and run right on back to her. So I picked _Soldier of Fortune_. Got an ice cream with the last of my money an' sat on a bench by this big fountain display readin' it. When I got home I hid it inside my pillowcase. It was in there for years, my pillow used to crinkle whenever I put my head on it. I thought it was okay to leave it there 'cause we usually did our own laundry. But one time Ansel did somethin' that pissed her off, I don't remember what, and she told him he had to do all our shit for a week. I came home from school and she was sittin' with it on the table in front of her."

He finishes his story on a flat note and lifts his shoulders in a plaintive half-shrug. Eugene fumbles through the story again in his mind, as best as he can remember it, picking out pieces here and there: his uncle Henley, his mother and her Lysol hands, jambalaya and a can of coke. He says, a little hesitantly, "Why didn't you just tell her you wanted to join the army or somethin'?"

"It was a four-year-old magazine and I kept it in my pillowcase," Merriell says, evenly. "I guess I coulda tried, but somethin' just kinda snapped, anyway. Didn't really occur to me to lie. I thought, y'know, why not just tell her? What's the worst she could do?" He pauses for a moment, lips pressed together, looking faraway. "She drove me up here like two days later. I didn't know where we were goin'. She didn't let me say goodbye to Fanny."

Eugene's brow furrows sympathetically. "I'm sorry." It's nothing like Merriell's emphatic response, so he waits a second before he tries again, parroting him, "That blows ass." Unexpectedly, Merriell's face cracks into a smile, a huge grin, and a moment later it's chased up by a laugh. It's the first time Eugene has heard him laughing, genuinely laughing; not some cruel snicker but a real, honest laugh. It makes Eugene grin too, even as he's going pink, abashed. "What? What's so funny?"

"You," Merriell says. "Never in a million years did I think I'd ever hear you say the word 'ass', Gene. Better wash your mouth out with soap."

The nickname sounds nice in Merriell's mouth, an easy sound, flowing, his slightly soft touch on the G. He wishes there was some way he could say he likes it without it sounding strange or cloying. As it stands, all he can do is let it float there, _Gene_. It's not that nobody has ever called him that before, but it's different now that Merriell's done it. Eugene shuffles and settles on his pillow. "Are you goin' to the party?"

"Wouldn't dream of lettin' John down. Ain't never seen a grown man so excited about a party." Merriell isn't smiling any more but he looks comfortable, at least. "I ain't got a date, though. Ain't quite the stud you are."

"Stop it," Eugene says, feeling heat rise up to his cheeks again. "It's not really a date, anyway. We're just sorta – goin' together. Why don't you ask Susanna?"

Merriell looks at him flatly. "I dunno if you know this, Gene, but I'm actually gay." Something about the way he says it makes it sound not-real, another joke. Eugene smiles, breathing out sharply through his nose, almost a laugh, but Merriell doesn't join in. More than anything, Eugene wishes he would. It had been so nice to hear him laugh, the unexpected sweetness of the sound.

"Don't you hate it?" Eugene asks, after a pause. For some reason, he can't bring himself to look at Merriell straight-on, now, and diverts his gaze past him, to the crucifix nailed to the wall above Merriell's desk.

"Hate what?" Merriell asks, very quietly.

Eugene, taking his lead, drops to a whisper. "Bein' gay."

He might not be looking at Merriell, but he can feel Merriell looking at him. He doesn't say anything for a long while, a minute ticking by in silence, the longest sixty seconds; Eugene's almost convinced he might've fallen asleep, but then he sucks in a breath and says, "No. I don't." Eugene's about to ask something else, he doesn't know what but he can feel the urge for it bubbling up, but just as he's about to open his mouth their door creaks all the way open. Even with his eyes snapped shut on instinct, he can feel the beam from the flashlight lingering on him and then moving away to Merriell. For the longest time he'd been sleeping through the sporadic bedroom checks, so used to it that he'd forgotten they even existed, but feeling his heart thudding in his chest at the fear that they might've been overheard is an uncomfortable reminder that he has to change, he has to get better and get out of here and go home.

 

*

 

Everything really does feel better with Merriell as his friend again. The room starts to feel like a shared space again, and somehow it's easier to concentrate on reading or writing with the tinny sound of Merriell's music coming gently through his headphones. As the party rockets closer, John kicks them all into preparation overdrive. The day of, he and Merriell are assigned to decorate the cafeteria, scraping the tables aside to make room for a dance floor. They're left alone in the newly open space with a box full of streamers and other wall decorations to pick through and tack up. Merriell is standing with his hands on his hips, peering into the box. Abruptly, he squats down, picks up a long piece of pink-flagged bunting printed with pictures of Barbie dolls with expansive eighties bouffant hairstyles, and stretches his arms out to display as much of it as possible. "Really?"

"John said we don't have to use all of it." Eugene's in particularly high spirits today since there's been an uncharacteristic drop in temperature and he's not unduly discomfited by the heat, for the first time this whole summer. In spite of his yearly flus and other illnesses around fall and winter, he much prefers the colder months. Maybe his November birthday has something to do with it, but it's not entirely to blame. He troops over to the box and bends down next to Merriell, poking around in it and eventually coming up with some streamers in various tones of blue. "How about these over the door?"

They fall into a cooperative quiet, occasionally floating ideas to each other about the placement of garlands, asking if something looks wonky or out of place. Despite Merriell's reservations, the Barbie bunting ends up over the hatch into the kitchen where they usually go to collect their meals. The entire room is a mismatched rainbow of colours and Eugene finds himself thinking that the place would generally look better, a lot happier, if it had been decorated like this the whole time.

He's affixing a garland to the wall when Merriell calls his name. He turns abruptly to see Merriell stood on a chair on one foot, wobbling slightly, trying to tack some streamers above a window near the buffet table. Eugene drops the garland, which flops lopsidedly, and hurries over. Merriell's brow is furrowed with concentration. "Are you taller than me?"

"No, we're the same height." Eugene doesn't really know when he'd noticed this, but he must have done, if he's saying it with such conviction. "Do you need a hand?"

"Uh – sure. Can you hold this steady?" Eugene steps closer, putting a hand on the back of the chair, which he has to move to the sides of the backrest as Merriell sets his foot down on it.

"Oh, you're not going to—" Eugene manages before Merriell steps off with his other foot, wobbling precariously on the thin edge of the backrest. He stretches out, stabbing at the wall with the streamer and managing to make contact just as he finally loses what's left of his balance. He slips forward and crashes right into Eugene, who crumples to the floor immediately, the breath knocked out of him. Merriell's light but not as a feather; he has enough substance that it hurts when he knocks into him, and for a moment Eugene just lies still, unsurprised by the turn of events but still lightly shocked by the fall.

Merriell, flopped on top of him, pushes up and immediately peers over him, eyes wide. Their faces are very close and for a moment Eugene doesn't know what to do or say, and then he coughs, which takes care of that. Merriell's brows knit together. "Sorry, Gene."

"'S okay," he says, cracking his lips up into a smile. "Was kinda stupid of you, though."

"Yeah." Merriell hasn't moved, his hands either side of Eugene's head. His eyes flick so obviously to Eugene's mouth and away again that it has to be purposeful, and immediately Eugene feels himself going red. "Are you okay?"

"Yes," Eugene says, trying to sit up brusquely, but Merriell still hasn't moved an inch and their heads knock together. Eugene inhales, a sharp burst of pain rushing up to the centre of his forehead, and he lifts a hand to rub at it. "Are you going to move?"

"Yeah," Merriell says, and nothing happens. Eugene waits expectantly, lips pressed together, but Merriell's exactly where he has been, unyielding. His eyes flicker downwards again and Eugene's cheeks burn. Merriell's brow puckers into a frown. He says, quiet but rushed, the fastest he's ever spoken, "You're so pretty when you blush."

Something flips in Eugene's stomach, not butterflies but something harder, more concrete. He hears himself swallowing, an obnoxious sound. In lieu of something to say, the only thing rattling around in his brain is the last thing Merriell said, which takes on something new and sharp the longer it's stuck in his head. His pulse is rushing in his ears. Merriell smells like the rest of them but there's his own scent underneath it all, nothing like floral perfume pressed over the top. Eugene inhales and it's shaky to his ears. He should say something, anything at all, anything to cut into the silence, but all he can think is that Merriell thinks he looks pretty, that Merriell has noticed, that he's been looking, that he knows, that he said it out loud and Merriell is right there, and. And.

It's almost a relief to hear the door to the cafeteria open, until he remembers where they are, what they're doing, and panic abruptly sets in. Merriell scrambles away from him just Eugene hears John's voice carrying across the room. "Wow, this is lookin' great." Eugene, his heart murmuring away, picks himself up off the floor and brushes himself down. "Eugene, there you are," John continues, and then, "Where's Mer— oh," as Merriell stands up too. It must look telling, obvious, so obvious, the two of them getting up from the floor where they'd been crouching, hidden behind the buffet table, Eugene pink-faced, the chair toppled on its side. John looks between them with his hands on his hips and Eugene wonders what he's going to say, if he's going to acknowledge any of it, make a joke, yell at them, drag them both to Dr Harlow's office. As it stands, though, John just looks between them, and then says, "It looks great, guys, well done. I think I've worked y'all hard enough."

It's the closest they're going to get to a free pass. Merriell's the first to leave, closely followed by Eugene. Outside, the weather might not be quite as unpleasantly hot as it has been the last few weeks, but it's still bright enough that he has to lift a hand to cover his eyes. By the time his eyes have gotten used to it and he lets his hand drop, Merriell is gone.

 

*

 

It's still light at eight o'clock when Eugene knocks on Laura May's door to walk with her down to the cafeteria. It's not quite as exuberant as a real prom, since Eugene is only wearing shorts and a light sweater, but it's exciting in a lowkey sort of way. Laura May, to his relief, hasn't overdressed either; she answers the door in a pale yellow summer dress, her hair pulled up into a bun. She beams at him as they're linking arms and heading down the corridor. "You look really nice," he says after a quiet pause, feeling somehow obligated.

"Thanks." She grins at him, giving him a little elbow in the side. "So do you."

Nothing more passes between the two of them until they get to the building that houses the cafeteria. John is outside with a polaroid camera, beckoning people on their way in to stop and stand under one of the trees, festooned with fairy lights, for a picture. Laura May wants one, and the arm around his elbow suddenly becomes a leash. Eugene's never really enjoyed having his picture taken. He's heard a lot about angles and poses and pressing your tongue against the back of your front teeth, but none of it ever seems to work for him. Still, he lets himself be dragged over. Laura gives the camera a cheesy, toothy grin and Eugene, with no idea of what else to do, smiles modestly. John snaps a picture and waggles the polaroid back and forth as they head back over. When he presents them with the photograph, Eugene barely looks like he's smiling at all.

He doesn't know what he'd expected from the actual party itself, but it feels a lot like every other school formal he's ever been to. There are no flashing disco lights and what passes for a DJ booth is just a tape player at maximum volume. Right now it's playing _Groove is in the Heart_ by Deee-Lite, but nobody's dancing, affording the entire affair a slightly sad, tepid atmosphere. The decorations he and Merriell put up earlier today are still standing, and it's while he's looking at the Barbie bunting that he realises he hasn't actually seen Merriell around here at all. He cranes his neck, trying to look around Susanna's curls, past the two boys sitting at one of the tables drinking fruit punch. He's not in any of the room's corners, he's not helping himself to snacks. He hadn't been in the room while Eugene was getting ready, either. The song melds into _What Is Love_ and Eugene wonders if Merriell had waited until Eugene was gone and then just snuck back in to listen to his Walkman. Whatever had transpired between them while they'd been decorating had been a fluke, a fluctuation in an otherwise perfectly normal friendship, never mind what Merriell had said, never mind how he'd said it, never mind that Eugene can't really stop thinking about it, that there's a part of him stuck on that moment, those seconds with Merriell that close, hands just shy of touching his face.

"Eugene, come dance with me," Laura May says suddenly, her hand circling his arm and slipping down to his wrist to give him a tug.

"Oh – uh." He's not a dancer, and he doesn't want to be looking at her while he's trying to squeeze Merriell out of his brain. "Can we get some punch first? I'm pretty thirsty."

Eugene manages half an hour. Laura May finally drags him out to dance to a Sixpence None the Richer song, although all he really does is hold one of her hands while she twirls around him. At least they seem to spur a few of the others out to dance too, and then he's less self-conscious about it. At some point Laura May grabs his other hand and moves closer, winding her arms around him, her head on his shoulder. With her hair tickling his nose, Eugene casts another look around for Merriell, but he definitely isn't here. As he's looking, Dr Harlow ducks under the streamers over the door, smiling distantly in that way she has as she gazes impassively around the space. John is trying to egg on the last few stragglers into joining the dance, waving his arms enthusiastically, Susanna is standing on her own with her eyes closed and her arms above her head, swaying in deep concentration, and Merriell is nowhere to be seen.

Eugene waits until the end of the song before he disentangles himself from Laura May. She looks confused, a little put-out, but he doesn't linger beyond the second it takes him to bark out a _sorry_ before he's heading for the door. He's sure that Dr Harlow must have watched him pass, but she makes no attempt to stop him on his way back up the gravel path to the dormitories. The sun is finally going down and the night has taken on a cooler temperature; it's not cold by a long shot, but in the shadows he feels goosebumps briefly prickle up over his legs. He strides inside, back along the corridor and to their bedroom, bumping the door all the way open.

Merriell is curled up on his side on his bed with his back to the door. He doesn't say anything, but Eugene's sure he must have heard him. The determination in his step has been lost and he crosses the threshold in slow, hesitant steps, two at a time and then one and then three. "Merriell?"

Merriell doesn't move. Eugene chews his lip for a moment and then edges around his bed, trying to get a look at his face. It's stony, impassive, and he doesn't look up, his gaze locked squarely on a mess of circuitry and snapped plastic and unspooled tape on the bed beside him that Eugene realises after a moment of incomprehension is his Walkman, smashed to pieces. He doesn't know much about electronics but none of this looks fixable.

"What happened?" he asks, a whisper. Without really thinking about it, he crouches down and then sits on the floor, cross-legged, looking up at him.

Merriell squashes his cheek against his pillow. "She came in while I was listenin'. She took it off of me. Threw it on the ground and stood on it." A muscle in his jaw jumps.

Eugene leans closer, laying his forearms on the edge of the bed and resting his chin on his wrist, trying and ultimately failing to quash the uncomfortable sickness rising in his stomach. Dr Harlow has never seemed exactly friendly to him, but for the last month or so he's been convinced she had their best interests at heart. Looking at Merriell's face, his posture, and the broken pieces of his one coping mechanism, Eugene wonders whether he might have been mistaken. It seems almost childish, a fit of pique, destroying something that Merriell holds dear. He wants to ask what she'd said, if she'd given any sort of reason, but the words stick in his throat.

Merriell's eyes flick up to him and away after a second. "What're you doin' in here?"

The answer is simple, and he's only too happy to give it. "Lookin' for you."

Merriell's jaw works, it looks like he's chewing the inside of his cheek. "Why?"

"'Cause you're missin' the party." Eugene tips his head to one side, laying his cheek on his arm and regarding Merriell properly for what feels like the first time. His eyes are clear and wide, framed neatly by thick, dark eyelashes, the same colour as his hair, which curls so effortlessly. Eugene is struck by an urge to touch him, somewhere, his cheek, the edge of his jaw, the bridge of his nose, the soft skin under his eyes. "C'mon," he says instead, gently. "There's still plenty of time."

"I don't wanna go to John's stupid party."

Eugene lifts his shoulders. "Neither do I."

"So," Merriell's voice has taken on a slightly petulant, grumpy tone, "why you makin' me come?"

"'Cause," Eugene presses his lips together, flat, eyes flicking over Merriell's face again, "everyone else is there."

"Good for them."

"Will you just come? Have some punch or something." As Eugene's talking, Merriell shifts, curling closer until his head bumps off the pillow and onto his mattress. Eugene falters slightly before he continues, "John bought too many donuts."

"That ain't my problem." Merriell's lips quirk up at one corner. He reaches out past his broken Walkman, his fingertips hovering in the air for a moment before he touches the sleeve of Eugene's sweater, pinching and pulling at it lightly before his index and middle fingers slip under the elasticated cuff, brushing over the lump that marks one of the bones in his wrist. The glancing touch sends a shot of warmth skittering all the way up Eugene's arm. It's such a deliberate thing that Eugene doesn't really know what to do with himself, where to look, but Merriell's fingers are gone as soon as they had arrived, his hand settling flat on the mattress. "Gimme one good reason why."

"Because—" The skin on the back of his neck is prickling and ignoring it is proving difficult considering the weight of Merriell's stare, the phantom touch he'd left behind. Eugene is faced with an urge to itch his wrist, scratch out the tickling feeling, but he doesn't want to draw attention to the lingering effect of a simple touch. He's running out of options, ways to ask Merriell to come. Something about leaving him here and going back to the party seems stupid, heartless, impossible to comprehend, but persuading him to come is proving to be just as difficult a task. He could give him a thousand other reasons but Merriell is stubborn, blunt and obvious about it, all folded arms and sour scowls, like he makes a living out of sucking lemons. Over the last month or so Eugene has grown quite fond of it, the way his face will twist into something repugnantly offended whenever someone asks him to do something he doesn't quite like the sound of. It's funny, of course, but more than that it's endearing. Going back to the party without Merriell simply isn't an option, even though Merriell said what he said earlier. It's easy to forgive him for saying it.

Eugene sighs through his nose. Merriell's face has drawn into something expectant, but the longer Eugene says nothing, the more it's becoming something verging on patronising. He leafs around in his head for some other persuasive route, some other aspect of the party that Merriell might like. Not the music, not the company, not the food or the punch, especially not the Barbie doll bunting he'd been so disparaging about. Eugene thinks back to that moment, their faces so close together and Merriell almost breathing it at him, an ugly confession that hadn't sounded ugly at all in the moment and still doesn't now.

"Because…?" Merriell eases through his thoughts, eyebrows perked up expectantly.

Eugene clears his throat. All at once, spilling out of his mouth, "Because I want you to come." The second he says it he expects to feel his face blossom pink, but by some miracle he doesn't blush, the tips of his ears aren't burning. He lifts his head up and presses his lips together, nodding, a sense of finality to it. It's not as if it was a lie; he does want Merriell to come. More than anything, he wants him to come.

Merriell holds his stare for a few more seconds, enough for a seed of doubt to flourish, a dark green sprig of fear that maybe he'd said too much. It feels like he's working against every bone in his body to hold Merriell's stare, until Merriell abruptly breaks the line between them to roll his eyes, and then to Eugene's utter surprise he sits up and tears a hand through his hair and says, with an air of resignation, " _Fine_." Eugene pulls his arms off the bed to give Merriell some space to get up, a starburst of excitement fizzling in his stomach as he's pushing himself up to stand, quite unable to stop himself from grinning. Merriell hasn't changed since they were decorating earlier; all he does is shove his feet into a pair of sneakers before he's heading for the door. Without turning, like he's just assuming that Eugene is following, he says, "I ain't gonna stay if it's shitty, Gene."

Eugene waits until Merriell is out in the hallway before he admits, "It's pretty bad. You don't have to stay long."

Merriell turns to walk the rest of the corridor backwards, hands in the pockets of his jeans. "What kinda music are they playin'?"

"Awful lot of Sixpence."

"Uh huh. Bet you were lovin' it. What's that song?" He breaks into a horrible, warbling falsetto, completely out of tune, " _Kiss me, da-da-da milky coffee_ —"

Eugene lets out a sharp burst of laughter against his will, slapping a hand over his mouth. " _Twilight_ , milky _twilight_."

Merriell stops walking, grinning, his arms held up, palms open and facing out like he's trying to prove he's not armed. "A'ight, shit, didn't know I was in the presence of a Sixpence superfan. How's twilight get to be milky?"

"I don't know." Eugene stops, just shy of bumping into him, his hands landing on his hips. "Clouds, maybe?"

"Clouds." Merriell looks like he's thinking it over, and then abruptly turns around and makes for the door to the building. The sun's completely gone by now, the sky a rapidly darkening purple. The fairy lights in the tree outside the cafeteria are starting to glint pleasantly and now that they're outside Eugene can hear music and conversation, distant but still audible. Merriell says, as they fall into step beside each other, "I thought you were goin' with Laura May."

"I did. I am."

"Hope you danced with that poor girl 'fore you ditched her, Gene," Merriell says solemnly, even sounding a little sincere about it.

"Oh, I did," Eugene says, lifting a hand to rub at the back of his neck to hide a cringe. In retrospect, it probably wasn't kind of him to leave her in the lurch like that, but it's not like he wasn't planning on coming back. "Against my will."

Merriell scoffs. " _Against your will_ my ass. I bet you were lovin' it. World's biggest Sixpence fan, I bet you had your routine all planned out."

"You are so obsessed with this," Eugene says around a grin. "I'm startin' to think you're the superfan."

They're not all that far away from the cafeteria building when Merriell stops again, eyes narrowing, expression pinched into a scowl. "You didn't tell me she was here."

It takes Eugene a second to realise what he's talking about, only clocking it after he follows Merriell's line of sight and eventually lands on the back of Dr Harlow's head. "Oh. She came in just as I was leaving." He feels his brow pucker as it furrows. "She must've come straight from our room. Come on." Without really thinking about it, he reaches for Merriell's arm and wraps his hand around his bony wrist, giving him a little pull. Merriell is suddenly very resistant, like he's rooted himself into the ground. It's almost instantly obvious that he's not going to let Eugene pull him anywhere, so Eugene lets go of him, rubbing the palm of his hand on his shorts and then wondering for a second if he'd meant for that to look like he was wiping himself clean. He hadn't. "We can't just stand here all night."

The longer Merriell stands there, unmoving, the more Eugene starts to wonder if it might not be anger that's holding him down, if it could be something else. He chews his bottom lip for a moment and then says, "Why don't we go sit down by the stream instead?" The stream isn't really substantial enough even to be a stream; it's just a thin trickle of water splashing against pebbles out behind the cafeteria, though it's not standing water, so following it in one direction or another would probably lead out to the river. The cafeteria is built close to the edge of a slope, a dip in the landscape that accommodates the stream at the bottom. Eugene puffs out a sigh and tips his head a little to one side. "It's a nice night."

He's barely even finished saying that when Merriell nods and turns on his heel, striding off to hook around the light-strewn tree and behind the cafeteria building. Eugene jogs a little to catch up, rounding the corner in time to see Merriell stop at the bottom of the slope by the stream, with his arms folded tightly over his chest. Eugene's lips pull down at the corners. The music is still audible even out here, filtering through the walls, though with an echoey distance to it. It's painting an odd atmosphere to the scene; the warmth of the evening even without the sun, the strange expansive sound of _Two Princes_ by Spin Doctors in its last third. Eugene troops over to Merriell and stops in front of him, their sneakers almost touching. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Merriell says with an obviously forced lightness. His body looks almost taut with tension, like he might rip into shreds at a moment's notice, like the only thing keeping him standing is the rigidity of his skeleton. His eyes flick up to meet Eugene's concerned, slightly probing stare. In a much quieter voice, "She told me I was never gonna get better."

It makes Eugene's brow furrow. He's never heard her say that to anyone, even to what most people would call lost causes. More importantly, though, he's never heard Merriell talk about himself like that, like he needs to get better at all. It should feel good, exciting, like progress; the first step of conquering any illness is admitting you have it, after all. But right now, Eugene's faced with a strange feeling of disappointment and even, unpleasantly, a sense of being unmoored, untied from his dock and left to float in a sea that's quickly becoming choppy. It's always been the way it's always been and now, suddenly, it isn't. _She told me I was never gonna get better_.

"I thought—" Eugene starts, his words catching in his dry throat. He swallows and tries again. "I thought you didn't want to get better."

Merriell's jaw hardens, a muscle in it jumping. "I just wanna get outta here. I'm sick of this shit. Don't it make you wanna—" He gives his head a few small, determined shakes. "It just makes me feel like shit. This whole place. I don't believe in none of it and it's never gonna work."

Eugene worries at his bottom lip for a moment. "It's working for me."

"No it ain't." There's a waspish harshness to Merriell's voice now, and Eugene feels himself recoil from it. "You're just scared. All she does is make you push it down until it's all the way inside you," quick as a flash, he reaches out and jabs Eugene hard in the soft part of his stomach, "and it goes bad in there. She wants you to hate yourself." Eugene opens his mouth to voice a protest but Merriell cuts over him smoothly before he can say anything. "This whole thing, all of it, it's just bullshit. It's _bullshit_. You can't change how you're born and you shouldn't even want to. What's wrong with it? It made you happy, right? That's what you told me. With your friend. You said you were happy, you said you liked it."

"But – it wasn't right."

" _Right_? Accordin' to _who_? Your brother? Since when do you give a fuck about what he says about right an' wrong?"

Eugene gapes for a second, a fish out of water, and scrambles to form another defence. "My mother—"

Merriell scoffs over him. "You want your mother on your side? Even after you came out to her and she just cried? She wouldn't even let you _touch_ her, she—"

"Yes!" It's like Merriell has been actively trying to make him mad, goading him into it. Eugene feels a rush of red-hot anger course through him, his pulse racketing in his ears. " _Yes_ , I want her on my side, are you insane? She's my _mother_. Just because you don't know what it's like to have a mother who loves you—"

The last few words of his sentence are knocked out of him when Merriell shoves him hard in the chest with both hands. He stumbles backwards a few steps, miraculously holding his footing, though the shock of the hit has sent tears springing into his eyes. He blinks them away, but one skips past his eyelashes and rolls down the side of his nose; he brushes it away with the heel of his hand, sniffing. Merriell is standing with his hands in fists by his sides, visibly trembling with rage. For a long, horrible stretch, Eugene is faced with nothing but silence.

He breathes jaggedly through his nose and turns his head away, jaw setting, trying to clear his head. What he wants more than anything is to go home, to see his parents again, to see Deacon again, to sleep in his own bed and have days that belong to himself and nobody else. He'll be eighteen in November, ready for college and the rest of his life, stretching out ahead of him with so much promise. All he has to do, the only thing, is get through God's Hope and come out better on the other side. The rest of his life is contingent on fixing this before it curdles and takes hold, and if he doesn't fix it his mother will hate him forever. She'd never said it explicitly, but it's clear to him. She'd never want him as a son again, never coax him through bouts of sickness again, never sit with him through sleepless nights again. His father may be a different question entirely, but it's his mother who makes the rules in the house, his mother who decides who comes and who goes. He'd be motherless, the way people are when their mothers die. It'd be a sort of death, a sort of bereavement, for both of them. She'd die in his life and he would be dead to her. No son of hers. Nowhere to go, no allowance, no inheritance, no stability, no security, no life. And for what? For calling himself homosexual? For liking boys? For being gay?

He doesn't realise Merriell has closed the space between them until he feels hands on his face, cupping his jaw. He's saying something but all Eugene can really register is the low murmur of his voice, and then he folds his arms around him, a hand in his hair, and Eugene lets himself be pulled close, eyes shut, hot tears leaking onto the shoulder of Merriell's shirt as he presses his face there. Like a delayed reaction, he lifts his hands up after a second, twisting his fingers tightly in the back of Merriell's shirt. It's almost as if he's not even in his body, like it's acting without his permission. He feels it rack, shudder through a sob; he feels Merriell's shirt on his fingertips, Merriell's body solid against his, his hand in Eugene's hair. The ringing in his ears fades so slowly that he can't remember exactly when it stopped, and then all he can hear is cicadas, the distant trill of _Time After Time_ floating over to them from the party, and Merriell's voice in his ear. "It's okay, Gene. It's okay. You're okay."

It can't have been long after that, because the song hasn't changed, when Merriell's foot presses over his toes for half a second. By his ear again, he mumbles, "Sorry, Gene."

Eugene lifts his head, knowing he must look awful, puffy-eyed and distant. "What're you doin'?"

Merriell blinks. "Tryna dance with you. Move your feet."

"—dance with me?"

"Yeah. Get with the program." With a greater degree of intentionality than earlier that day, he presses their foreheads together, his gaze sharp. There's something comforting about the holes his eyes seem to bore right into Eugene, right down inside him, through his bones and their marrow. Eugene lets out a breath, slow. His clawed grip on Merriell's shirt relaxes, his fingers spreading out a little over the ridges of his shoulder blades. Every point of contact with him radiates comfort, calm and warm and clear. Merriell sways them both to the left, the right, the left again. Their rhythm settles.

Something about the proximity to him makes Eugene whisper. "I'm sorry."

"'S okay," Merriell whispers back.

"I'm really sorry."

"You didn't mean it."

"I still said it. It was a horrible thing to say."

Merriell doesn't reply, just presses his lips together and nods, his forehead slipping down to the bridge of Eugene's nose for a second before he lifts his head up again. "It's a'ight, Gene." The longer they stand like this, swaying just enough to fall under the definition of dancing only in the loosest of terms, the more Eugene is starting to worry about the panic that might come rushing back to him if Merriell ever lets go. It makes him hold on a little tighter, arms pulling tighter around him. Merriell responds in kind, his fingers twisting in Eugene's hair.

"How did you know this would help?" Eugene mumbles. He doesn't need to patronise Merriell by telling him that it did at all, since it's so patently obvious. The anxiety he's been carrying around with him feels like it's been painlessly peeled away, but it's only right in this moment that he's realised he'd been shouldering the weight of it at all.

"Iunno." It feels like there's a spot of glue dabbed between their foreheads, like trying to pull away would tear a hole. Merriell smiles. "I didn't. I just wanted to. It's helpin'?"

"Yeah." He feels Merriell's fingers pull through his hair, brushing over his scalp, the touch so light that it makes Eugene's eyelids flutter a little, a warm tickling feeling rolling down the back of his neck. Spurred on by it, he blurts out, "I don't want to let go of you."

Merriell presses out a breath. His other hand lands on the back of Eugene's neck, a concentrated warmth that doesn't dissipate that tickling feeling as much as it presses it out, spreading over his shoulders, down his arms and his spine and low into his belly, bubbling there like a recently opened can. "Then don't."

As much as he'd like to condense the rest of his life down to this moment, right here, it's not realistic. "I'm gonna have to, sometime."

Merriell chews his bottom lip for a moment and then lets his hand slip from Eugene's neck, over his collarbones, to land flat in the centre of his chest. Eugene can feel his fingers splaying out, though he's still looking squarely at Merriell, who's looking right back. Merriell sucks in a breath and says, very quietly, "I'm right here."

Whatever he means by that, whatever he _could_ mean, Eugene doesn't mind. It's not the meaning that matters but the closeness, the touch. Eugene shuts his eyes and pulls his arms tighter, until Merriell is pressed against him, his hand squashed between the two of them. He expects it to seem unreal, all of this, Merriell and his proximity and the fact that all Eugene can think about is him, but it doesn't.

"How are you going to cope with this?" he whispers. With his eyes closed it's easier to imagine they're somewhere, anywhere, else, so it doesn't feel like such a waste of their closeness to bring it up. "Being here?"

"I dunno."

"If you got to leave you'd just be sent back home again."

"Not for long. I'm eighteen in January. I'll get a job, move out. I'll move in with my uncle until I got enough money and then find my own place."

"Away from your mother."

"A million miles away from her. She ain't never gonna find me." Merriell's fingers still in Eugene's hair. "Gene?"

Eugene opens his eyes.

"Let's run away." There's a breathless intensity to Merriell now, his grip in Eugene's hair tightening for a second, although not enough to hurt. "Let's just go, right now. We can get out onto the highway and hitchhike into the city or somethin'."

"Go?" He's a few words behind, his brain slow on the uptake. He loosens his grip around Merriell, but doesn't let go completely. "Go where?"

"I dunno. Anywhere. When's your birthday?"

"November."

"Okay. November." Merriell's hand falls out of his hair and lands on his chest too. "November. That ain't long. You can wait it out at my uncle's and then once you're eighteen your parents can't tell you what to do."

"We – we can't just go. We couldn't just leave, they'd come after us."

"Okay, what about tomorrow? After roll call. We get breakfast, we say we're gonna go out for a hike. They'd let us go. John let me go before. He even gave me sandwiches to take with me. He'd let us go and we could just hop the fence and go. They wouldn't even know we're gone until they check our room after bed. Gene – Gene, listen to me." His hands shift to Eugene's shoulders and he gives him a little shake. "They ain't fixin' you here, they're breakin' you. There's nothin' wrong with who you are."

Merriell moves back and that point of contact at their foreheads is finally broken, but as if they're still connected by some thread, Eugene stumbles after him. "Merriell," he says, slowly, his voice to his own ears sounding thin and distant. "We can't just—"

"Why?" Merriell says, whippet-quick. "Why can't we? Fuck this whole place, Gene. Fuck the icebergs, fuck John, fuck Dr Harlow. We ain't sick, neither of us. None of us. The only sick thing is them." He gestures emphatically back up to the cafeteria building and then looks back at Eugene expectantly, his chest rising and falling hard. The longer Eugene's silence draws on, his expression shifts from something close to triumphant, all the way to a muted sense of uncertainty. "Gene. C'mon."

"I don't know. Let – let me think about it, please." He pulls the sleeves of his sweater down over his hands, self-conscious all at once, worrying at his bottom lip. "I'll think about it."

"Okay." Merriell's lost some of his desperate urgency, though he still looks wound up, like he's built up all this energy and now he doesn't know where to put it so he's just holding it in. He looks away, brow furrowed, hugging himself tightly. "Think about it."

It's a strange and unsettling work of fate that they'd spent all that time that close to each other and it's only now that they're three feet apart and no longer touching that they're finally interrupted. Eugene has almost been expecting it, finding a strange release of energy when he hears John call down from the top of the hill, "Eugene? Merriell? You guys okay down there?" A pause, and then, "You're missin' the party!"

 

*

 

They're in bed two hours later than usual, thanks to the party. Eugene is restless and unsettled, tossing and turning fruitlessly. Merriell over in his bed is perfectly still, his back to Eugene, but he can't work out of he's sleeping or just lying there in wait. He'd made it sound so easy, that all they'd have to do would be to run out when nobody's looking, find the highway and follow it back to civilisation. Maybe Merriell is more used to things like hitchhiking, but neither of them have any money – just Eugene's one precious quarter, currently on his bedside table, catching moonlight – and as much as Merriell kept talking about turning eighteen, neither one of them is there yet.

But in spite of everything screaming at him that Merriell's plan is badly thought out at best and irrational, bordering on desperately insane, at worst, Eugene can't stop thinking about it. He's never been to New Orleans before but he can imagine it quite clearly, the brightly coloured buildings, the balmy weather, all that history and culture. He imagines Merriell's uncle's house, some flower-festooned two-floor building sandwiched between a row of others, poky and small, but there'd be room for them. Merriell's uncle, maybe with the same head of wild dark hair as Merriell, offering them a place to stay in the spare room. At first they'd switch between the single and the sofa, but at some point Eugene would already be asleep and Merriell would squirrel in behind him, and Eugene would be awake but he wouldn't shrug him away, even when Merriell's arm slides around his waist and he noses at the back of his neck. When Eugene can't sleep Merriell will be there, playing with his hair, talking to him in his slow, steady voice. He'll fall asleep with his head on Merriell's chest, listening to his heartbeat, their legs twined together. They'll find jobs and eventually their own place, and it'll be cheap because they only need one bedroom between the two of them. Sometime after they find their new house, they'll be festooned together on their creaky old bed and Merriell will draw Eugene's face close to his with a hand on his cheek and kiss him, long and slow. Merriell holding him on their tiny balcony. The two of them sharing home-cooked food, beignets from the store that Eugene buys on the way home, Merriell wiping powdered sugar from Eugene's cheek and kissing him there. Feeling settled, comfortable, happy, safe. No shame, not even an ounce of it. He'll call his mother with Merriell rubbing circles over his back, between his shoulder blades, and he'll tell her that he's happy exactly how he is, that all he wants is to be happy, that he doesn't want to change, that this place was hurting him and if she wants him to convert himself then she'll be hurting him too. And maybe she'll be upset, but somehow she'll understand, she'll hear it in his voice, that he's happy, and she'll know in her heart that all she wants for him is to be happy, and that it doesn't matter how he gets there. She and his father will come to visit, and at first they might be a little shocked by their tiny space, by the cramped conditions and the outdated appliances, but they'll grow to love its charm, and when they meet Merriell they'll love him too, for making Eugene happy.

And he will be happy. God help him, he will be happy.

Eugene turns over onto his right, looking at the back of Merriell's head. "Are you awake?" he whispers.

Merriell turns instantly to face him. His eyes are wide open. "Yeah."

"Let's go tomorrow."

 

*

 

It doesn't take much time for Eugene to pack up his things. He'd barely been able to sleep last night with the low thrum of excitement bubbling away inside him, and once he'd started to hear birds he'd given up on sleep entirely. Everything fits into his bag the same way it had when he'd been packing to leave, nothing extra added. Merriell seems to be in the same place, though he has to force his bag closed with some strength not because it's too full but because he's just thrown everything in haphazardly, no concern for folding. Eugene is just zipping up his bag when he hears the sound of something tearing and turns to see Merriell shredding his iceberg into tiny pieces. He looks up when he feels Eugene's eyes on him and, without really thinking about it, Eugene grabs his own iceberg and tears it neatly in half, then into quarters, again and again until it's just tiny squares of confetti. They both leave for breakfast at the same time, their bags next to each other by the door. Eugene lets Merriell walk ahead of him to the cafeteria.

John has rearranged the tables to the way they used to be, but all of the decorations are still up, even the Barbie bunting over the hatch. Merriell grins at Eugene as he's scooping scrambled eggs onto his plate and slips around him to find a table. Eugene watches him cross the cafeteria and sit down at an empty table, attacking his breakfast with vigour. It's another pale, slightly grey day; Eugene feels like it's somehow auspicious, because walking any distance in regular summer weather would have been unpleasant to say the least. He adds a piece of bacon to his plate after a moment's indecision and moves away from the hatch, aiming for Merriell's table. Merriell takes a bite of his toast and then Eugene thrums to a stop, barricaded from moving any further by Dr Harlow, who has appeared apparently out of nowhere in front of him. He stumbles back a step and his piece of bacon skitters off his plate. He stares at it on the floor for a second before Dr Harlow's voice knocks him out of his daze.

"Eugene, I'm sorry to interrupt your breakfast before you've even sat down to eat," she says, "but you have a phone call in the office."

"A phone call?" he repeats dumbly, blinking. He can't seem to focus his eyes on her directly.

She nods. "I'm sure it won't take long. Why don't you put your plate down here," and before he's even really aware of it, she's eased it out of his hands and set it down on the nearest table, "and you can come right back to it afterwards. If you want you can have it warmed up but I'm sure it won't take that long. Yes?"

"—okay." Eugene blinks slowly at her, watching her smile, a delayed reaction before she takes a step back and then heads towards the door with her hand on his arm. He looks around her as he's walking and finds Merriell again, who is looking back at him with unmitigated panic on his face, his toast halfway to his mouth.

Eugene crosses the yard in silence, Dr Harlow's hand on his arm. The camp's office is right near the gate; he's never been in here before, only ever seen it from the outside. The phone is sitting face-up on the desk, the receptionist elsewhere, thumbing through files. Eugene looks to Dr Harlow and she nods at him encouragingly. As if he's expecting the handset to sprout legs and scuttle off, he reaches out to it slowly, picking it up with a quiet sense of unease beginning to spread out like roots throughout him.

"Hello?" He hears himself saying it but it doesn't sound entirely like his voice.

"Eugene? Is that you?"

"Yes. Who—?" It hits him a second later and his hand curls tightly around the phone, his fingernails finding his palm. "Mother."

"Oh, Eu _gene_ ," his mother crows down the line, miles and miles away but she could be right in front of him for all he cares. Tears prick at his eyes and he sucks in a quivering breath. "Eugene, oh, sweetheart, I've missed you so much. Oh, darling, my darling boy—"

"Mother—" Eugene's thoughts twist into panic and then back again, a sea of calm that roils suddenly with a burgeoning storm, which dissipates into a cloudless sky. He leans forward, his free hand pressing onto the desk, fingers spreading out. "I missed you."

"Eugene…" It's clear from the sound of her voice that she's started to cry too; she clears her throat and sniffs, and it's like he can see her dabbing at her nose, under her eyes. "I missed you too."

"I want to come home, Mummie," he whispers, clinging to the phone with all his might. "Please, I want to come home now."

"I'd like that very much. I really would, Eugene. I would love for you to come home. You have no idea what it's been like without you."

"Please." Desperation creeps into his voice. "Please, Mummie, _please_. I want to—"

"They said you'd been doing so well, Eugene."

"I have, I promise. I'm doing well. I want to—"

"Then what were you doing last night with this boy?"

It's like he can feel the acid in his stomach curdle and eat through the lining, searing through his body, a stinging sickness rising in his throat. He clutches the phone with his other hand, fingers locked together around it. "What boy?"

"Don't play stupid with me, Eugene, this is no time for games. You were _seen_. You were seen with a boy. Embracing him." Her voice moves away from the phone and he hears her sob, openly. "Were you even trying at all?"

"Yes, yes," he can feel his legs wobbling, the strength it's taking to hold himself up is all being pushed into the grip he has on the phone. "Yes, I promise. I've been trying, I swear, I _promise_. I've been trying."

"Why, Eugene?" his mother says plaintively, desperately. "Why are you lying to me?"

His mouth wavers and trembles, words slipping back down his throat as soon as he's opened his mouth to let them out. He lets himself drop down onto the floor, pulling the phone on its cord with him, his back hitting the stability of the drawers behind him and rooting itself there. "I'm sorry," he says, tears trickling down his cheeks. He wipes his nose on his sleeve. "Mummie, I'm sorry. Please don't be mad at me."

"I'm not mad at you, Eugene," she says on a sigh. "I'm not mad. I'm sick to my stomach. That you could be this weak, after all this time, after how well you've been doing… It makes me want to cry for you."

"Mummie," he draws out the vowels, too upset to care that he sounds like a child, "I'm trying but it's so hard. It's inside me and I can't change it, I'm trying to change it. Please, please—" He hiccups, swallowing a few times, desperately. "Please, Mummie, I can't be here any more. I want to come home."

"You're staying there," his mother says, and he lets out a long, helpless moan. "No, Eugene. You're acting like a baby. You are staying there until you get better. I don't care how long it takes. I will not have you back in this house until you're better. Do you understand me?"

"But—"

"No, Eugene. Answer me."

"Mummie—"

"Eugene, I won't have this conversation with you again. Do you have any idea what you're doing to me? All this time you've been away from me, and then I get a call this morning telling me you're exactly where you started. It sickens me. I pray for you every day and it's as if you're rejecting my prayers. Rejecting God. You're ruining yourself like this, ruining everything."

"I'm sorry," he mumbles, with his thumbnail caught between his teeth. He turns so he can rest his temple against the drawers, more tears leaking out and rolling down his cheeks. "I'm sorry."

"Do you understand what I said?"

It comes out as a whisper. "Yes, Mummie."

"Good. I don't want another one of these phone calls, Eugene. I don't know what it would do to me. I don't mean to frighten you," she pauses and Eugene shuffles where he's sitting, mumbling a questioning half-syllable down the line, "but I feel as if – as if another call like that… Well, Eugene, it could kill me."

A horrible, sick feeling curls in his stomach, a snake, roiling and hissing. "No, no – don't say that, please don't say that."

"It's true," she says, matter-of-fact. "It's true, Eugene. I don't know how else to tell you this. It's all put so much strain on me, on this family. Your father is terrified that something might happen to you, your brother is worried sick about you. You have no idea how much you're responsible for, here, Eugene. We're all so worried about you that I don't feel I can tell anyone else this. I could never tell your father what I've told you, it would frighten him too much. Do you want that to happen? Do you want to frighten him?"

"No."

"Do you want me to die?"

"No, Mummie, never. Never."

"We all just want you to come home safe and better. Don't you want that?"

"It's all I want."

"Then you have to promise me. Promise me, Eugene. This will be the last phone call I have until the one telling me you're ready to come home."

"I promise. I promise. I swear on my life." Eugene's toes curl inside his sneakers. "I love you, Mummie."

"Yes, Eugene, I know."

Dr Harlow steps in front of him. She crouches down and, with a firm hand, eases the phone out of his grip, resetting it in the cradle. Wordlessly, she hands him a single tissue and watches him wipe his face, her gaze cold and hard. "I don't think Merriell is good for you." She pauses, as if expecting a reply, but he doesn't give one. "He'll be moved out of your room by tonight." Another long look at him, and then she moves close, putting her arms around him. He slumps bonelessly against her, his cheek on her shoulder. "Some people are here just to put us in the path of evil, Eugene. They're here just to tempt us. You'll be on the other side of this in no time at all."

Eugene shuts his eyes, tears soaking into the fabric of her blouse, and nods.

"Alright. Good." Dr Harlow pats his shoulder, lightly, and pulls away from him, holding him at arm's length. "Dry your eyes properly, and then you can go and have your breakfast." She presses another handful of tissues into his hand and stands up, watching with her arms folded as he wipes his eyes and nose and pushes himself up to stand.

The walk back to the cafeteria feels slower than the one there. His plate isn't on the table Dr Harlow had left it on, but after a moment's questioning he finds it again, waiting in the hatch, warmed up in the microwave for him. He lets Dr Harlow push him towards Laura May's table, and although it must be obvious that he's been crying, nobody says anything. He picks at his food listlessly, pushing it around on his plate, listening to Laura May start a fractured, slightly awkward conversation with Susanna after a few minutes of polite silence. Nothing on his plate looks appetising any more and the smell of the food is starting to make him feel sick. He looks up to pour himself a glass of water and finds Merriell's table empty, his plate clear. He has a sip of his water and lets his head hang again, managing to eat half a piece of toast before his desire to even be near food completely leaves him and he stands up to leave.

His path across to the dormitories is direct, he doesn't meander. When he gets back to their room, Merriell is sitting on the edge of his bed in a light jacket, tying his hiking boots. He looks up when he hears Eugene and grins at him, openly relieved. "Thought you got caught for a second."

Eugene swallows thickly, sits down on the edge of his bed. "She said she's movin' you out of this room."

Merriell takes that in, and then shrugs. "Who cares? They can move me wherever they want, I ain't gonna be here to give a shit." He leans over towards his pillow and picks up a bulky paper bag. "I asked John about goin' hikin'. He said it's fine, he packed us food. I dunno if it'll fit in my bag, maybe you can—"

"Merriell," Eugene says, a little loudly. "This is stupid."

"What is? I know you got a bunch of stuff, I was thinkin' maybe we could split—"

"No. This. Leaving. It's stupid."

"What?" Merriell looks up from the bag, his eyebrows pressing downwards. "No it ain't. I got it planned out. We're gonna—"

" _We're_ not gonna do anything." Eugene's hands curl together in his lap. It's taking every inch of him not to let himself cry. "I don't want to go."

"What?" Merriell says again. He shakes his head. "What? No. Yes you do. You said."

"I don't want to."

"But—"

"I'm not going."

"But the—"

"I'm gonna stay here," Eugene says, firm, like he's spelling it out to a child. "I'm gonna get better. And I'm gonna go home."

Merriell's eyes flick away for a second, to the door, and then back to him. "Is it somethin' she said to you?"

"It's how I feel."

The paper bag crunches as he stands up and dumps it on his bed, crossing the room to Eugene's side. "I can't even follow it in my head, the number of times you've changed your mind about me. You call me disgustin' an' then you tell me you don't wanna let go of me. I don't even know what you want any more."

"I wanna stay here. I wanna get better."

"Uh huh." Merriell's jaw works for a moment. "Okay. So – five minutes with her and you already can't wait to call yourself an ex-gay again. So last night was just—"

"I was in a bad mood and I needed someone and you were there."

"You goddamn coward," Merriell says softly. "You're a coward, Gene."

"You're the one who's been throwin' yourself at me all this time," Eugene snaps, pulled back into himself by the sound of his own name. "You've been tryin' to get me to ruin all of this all this time and last night you finally did it. I'm just ashamed I let you do it."

He lets out a hard, disbelieving laugh. " _Let_ me? You were drapin' yourself all over me, I couldn't have got away even if I wanted to." He rolls his tongue around in his mouth and breathes out sharply through his nose. "I shoulda known. I shoulda fuckin' known there was no winnin' with you. You're too far gone. You sad sack of shit, Gene, you're too far gone."

"Shut up!" Eugene hurls at him, the sound almost a bark, matching it with a hard push to Merriell's chest that sends him stumbling back and landing on his bed again. "Shut up shut up shut _up_! Shut up! I wish I'd never met you! You ruined my goddamn life, you _ruined_ it!" He feels almost hysterical with rage, trembling from head to toe, a hot rushing in his ears. "You're the worst person I've ever met. You're evil. You're _evil_."

Merriell snatches his backpack by the handle, white-knuckled, and swings it onto his back. "Keep tellin' yourself that," he says as he grabs the paper bag, folding it over a few times and hugging it against himself as he steps around him.

Eugene trips after him, unable to hold himself still, pure rage rolling through him unrelentingly. In a hard, strangled yell at the back of Merriell's head, "I hate you! I fucking hate you!"

Merriell stops in the doorway, his shoulders rising and falling visibly with each breath. When he turns around again, his expression is calm, even, unreadable. His eyes meet Eugene's easily, too easily. Quietly, "I feel so sorry for you." He waits a second in the doorway, as if he's expecting Eugene to say something else, to give it all up and tell him it was a joke, to run for his bag. Eugene feels rooted to the ground, impenetrable, like even if he wanted to move he wouldn't be able to. Merriell's lips press together, lifting up at one corner in a resigned smile, before he turns and heads down the corridor without another word. The last thing Eugene sees of him is the back of his head, before the door to the dormitory building shuts behind him.

 

*

 

Merriell was right that nobody would realise he was gone until it was too late. They send people out looking for him, but he'd left in the early morning and he was long gone by the time they were out on the roads, which wasn't until after ten o'clock at night. They'd asked Eugene where he went, of course, but all he could tell them was that he didn't know, that he'd talked about leaving and so he must have left.

The days stretch on. A few days after Merriell left, his bed is taken by Richard, one of the other boys. Richard is as quiet as Eugene; they don't really talk at all, but every night before they go to sleep, Richard prays on his rosary beads, kneeling by his bed with his eyes screwed shut. Eugene turns his back on him most nights to give him some privacy, but every now and then he'll watch and even join in in his head.

Dr Harlow helps him make another iceberg. This one is cleaner, all his own handwriting, and it stays on his bedside table now. His brother comes up once, a source of jealousy and resentment. He writes about his heart murmur, about his susceptibility, his gullibility, his willingness to be swept along by stronger boys than him because he wants to be liked, because nobody likes him, because nobody will until he's better.

All in all, all things told, totalled up, it takes two more months before Dr Harlow calls his parents and tells them he's ready. His parents drive up on one of early September's last summery days, and he's waiting for them on one of the benches outside the reception building when he sees the car pull up. His mother almost falls out of the car in her desperation to reach him, her arms out and open. He falls into her embrace like a drowning man pulled from the water at the last possible second, gasping desperately for breath, muscles fatigued and hypoxic. His father eases his bag out of his hands when it doesn't seem likely that his mother will let go of him; she only does when his father says, gently, "We ought to be on our way." She eases her arms from around him and gets back into the car, leaving his father to pat him on the shoulder and give it a firm squeeze.

Eugene, sinking low in the back seat, watches God's Hope disappear behind him in the rearview mirror. His heart, finally, feels settled in his chest, beating slow and even. In some way, he feels like he's survived something, though being there can't really have been all that dangerous. He lets his head drop to rest against the car door, feeling it vibrate gently, and shuts his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

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